


once and future things

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fate Direction, M/M, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 63,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7646194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Okay, but,” Niall babbles. “Something. C’mon, think of something. He can’t die. He can’t die. We’re the good guys. Good guys don’t die.”</p><p>Louis shakes his head slowly. “This is it,” he says, his voice as low as Niall’s ever heard it. “We die.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the end

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goreallegore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goreallegore/gifts), [niallator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niallator/gifts), [Bristol_Fashion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bristol_Fashion/gifts), [theamazingpeterparker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theamazingpeterparker/gifts), [dayinthelife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dayinthelife/gifts).



> PLS mind the violence warning! it should be your basic ya novel-level violence, but if you want to know about specific things, send me an ask at niallspringsteen.tumblr.com and i promise to get back to you asap.

Niall shifts at the edge of the greenbelt bordering the diner’s parking lot where Zayn’s having him meet Louis’s guy, Harry, for a rendezvous. Transformations used to hurt before he figured out that it wasn’t so much about forcing one shape on himself, one aspect, as it was about finding the wolf inside of himself or quietly putting it back in the box where he keeps all of the other things he’s careful about bringing out to show Theo.

Zayn’s got a thing about that, always says that the human form of a werewolf is more wolfen than the wolf-shape. Says, “I dunno, mate, it’s like,” he’d take a puff from a cigarette because it’d take a hell of a lot more than a smoke or a case of lung cancer to fell a wolf. “Like, when the wolf skin is on, the human’s inside, right? But when the human’s on the outside, the wolf is on the inside, like.”

And, anyway. Niall stuffs his wolf form back in the box full of tools that keep him alive and crouches down to retie his sneakers, because somehow running always manages to untie them. Bressie’s theory is that the psychic energy – that’s what he calls it, and they all take the piss out of him for it, falling over themselves moaning “psychic energy” like their lives are an episode of the X-Files – the psychic energy it takes to maintain one form or hold onto whatever you were wearing before the shift can drop off if you’re not paying enough attention.

Learning how not to come out of every shift naked with an armful of ruined clothing was a bright day in the Horan household. It meant Niall could start wearing real jeans again, and proper shoes, not soft t-shirts and slippers like some miniature version of the Hulk. He was such a little thing then. His school reputation, of course, never quite recovered.

Niall’s human nose is less sensitive than his wolf’s, but he can still pick out the threads of fried eggs, sizzling sausages, and damp hair from inside the diner. A drizzling rain patters on the blacktop parking lot and against the old Ford’s windshield. The Ford truck looks like something out of the last century with a proper steel body, not like the ones they make today out of aluminum. It reeks of wolf. Of another pack.

Zayn claims he can’t describe Louis’s pack scent beyond “horrifying and gross as fuck, dude,” but Niall can. Louis’s pack smells like overripe fruit and shoe wax and hair gel, it smells like hot coffee and cinnamon buns and sunscreen. Packs are flavored not only by the alpha, but also by the pack members, so Niall’s not surprised when he steps inside the tinkling diner door and Harry’s particular scent of peaches and massage oil floods his senses.

Niall remembers being human the same way he remembers his very early childhood. He’s pretty sure that there used to be more of a divide between his senses, but now each runs into the others like wine over the top of a wine glass in one of them pyramids rich people have for their weddings, or chocolate over the top of each tier in the little chocolate fountain Niall got Theo one birthday. They must’ve eaten everything covered in chocolate for weeks on end.

Harry’s scent pours over the top of Niall’s nose and fills his mouth with the taste of peach crème pie, and he can feel the slick warm massage oil on his hands and the tops of his shoulders like someone’s been trying to rub away the years of tension.

Life’s better with Zayn. Niall knows that. Even if he wasn’t a wolf, he thinks, he’d still enjoy having Zayn to go home too. He almost never cooks unless he’s reheating leftover takeout and his laundry and shit pile up in the bathroom until Niall scoops it all up and dumps it on his bed. Zayn sleeps on top of it, of course. But sometimes he slips under the covers next to Niall in his bed and pulls Niall’s arm across his skinny chest so that Niall can feel his heart beating against the scars on the inside of his arm, and it’s not a struggle to go back to sleep.

But it’s not all bickering and cuddling in equal measure. And it’s fine. It’s alright. Niall is what he is, now, thanks to a day in the forest he remembers only in the dead of night in his dreams, and at least Niall survived. As Laura always says, at least he’s alive. That’s not nothing.

And Niall has to protect this life. And Theo’s. Even Zayn’s. Alive means responsible.

Harry’s sat at the bar with his shaggy hair curling over the top of a bandanna patterned with a little stick figure skateboarding, and Niall’s stomach does a weird rumbly thing. The hunger is a different thing for everyone, but for Niall, it sits in his stomach, a deep well of emptiness that food doesn’t fill. Maybe it’s part of the wolf, maybe not. All Niall knows is that it wants something a lot closer to life than a steak well-done.

“Hey,” Niall says, sliding onto the stool beside Harry’s. A little ceramic bowl full of cubed melon and cantaloupe is sat in front of Harry beside an empty coffee mug. Niall arches an eyebrow. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was keeping you waiting.”

Harry hasn’t moved since Niall sat down. He’s barely turned his head to look at Niall, and his plush mouth is still set in a vaguely disapproving expression. He looks a little like a kindergarten teacher who caught his student eating soap out of the soap dispenser, which shouldn’t be such a nice thing to think about.

It’s still not the coldest welcome Niall’s ever had. That would’ve been the time he came home and Greg’s gambling buddy picked up the hammer from the counter, claw side out. Or maybe it was the time he and Zayn broke into an abandoned house for a place to squat for the night and a homeless bloke took one look at their receding fur and claws and fired off four quick warning shots right into Niall’s stomach and lungs.

And, anyway. Zayn’s killed people faster.

With that weird six sense that bloomed inside Niall’s head when he and Zayn packed up, Niall can feel Zayn pacing back and forth across the garden in front of their little ramshackle house. They’ve been renting it for two whole months now, long enough that Niall’s strung up laundry lines from the mostly dead tree in the back garden to the second floor window and Zayn’s spray-painted most every wall. He can feel Zayn’s irritation and his anxiety, and beneath all this, his hope like the salt on the rim of a margarita glass.

“Not waiting,” Harry says. “I like coming here. The French toast is very good. Do you want some?”

Niall thinks of the seventy-five cents in his pocket, and his stomach rumbles. “No,” Niall says.

“Here,” Harry murmurs, and shoves his plate over. There’s a triangle of French toast on it, soaked in maple syrup and powdered with fine white sugar, and something inside Niall’s head squeezes he’s got a migraine coming on. _Don’t_ , he feels Zayn pushing. Niall picks up the slice of French toast and wolfs it down. No pun intended. “See?” Harry asks, his eyes like the bottom of a lake. “Isn’t it good?”

Niall shrugs and nods. Human interactions feel so bizarrely inane, really. They’re not friends. Their pack leaders are about to lead them into a territory war and chances are, when that’s over, someone will come from outside and wipe whoever’s left off the map to claim the territory themselves. That’s just how it goes.

Niall clears his throat. “We should probably talk. About figuring out some sort of compromise, I mean.”

Neutral territories are good for working out compromises. It also means that their pack leaders won’t catch sight of each other and try to do a murder, which is also good. The thing is, Niall’s not sure, if it came down to it, that he could rip Harry’s soft throat out with his teeth. Niall tries to imagine it now. Zayn and Niall and Bressie and Laura and Ant and Danny facing off against Louis and Harry and their own ragtag pack of Grimmy and Fifi and that lot. Niall’s studied them plenty but he’s tried not to learn their names. It’s easier, he’s found, to put your teeth in someone’s neck if you aren’t thinking about their two children.

Plus, Niall’s got his own kid to watch out for. Theo’s as good as his, anyway. So all he has to do is picture Harry or Louis anywhere Theo and his sweet, innocent smile, and the rumbling thing inside his stomach revs up like an engine.

“Okay,” says Harry. “Let me pay the bill.” He leaves the waitress a twenty percent tip while Niall wonders when the last time was that he could afford to tip more than whatever leftover change he had in his pocket, and then they’re stepping back outside into the rain. It’s worked its way up to thrashing, now, so Niall pushes the hood of his anorak down and takes three, four deep breaths. Rain mutes taste and smell and even hearing, and it’s crippling in lots of ways but mostly it feels like being clean. Like being human again.

Harry goes over to his old Ford and Niall follows warily, making sure to put his back to the wall while he scopes out the area. For all he knows that lunatic Louis could be hiding under the truck to do him in. Niall hopes Bressie’s keeping Theo warm.

Harry turns the engine over and sets the heaters on high. Thin streams of condensation whirl up from both of them and their overheated skin, and Niall tips his head back against the head rest and closes his eyes. Just for a moment. Harry could probably reach over and jam that ballpoint pen through Niall’s heart before he even had time to fight back, but Niall’s hoping that he won’t.

They all have different methods of surviving. Coping. Niall’s is just. Hoping. Trying. Zayn says it’ll get him killed someday. Niall doesn’t much see the point in living if you can’t at least hope that people are worth a chance.

Harry folds his hands neatly in his lap. “I’d like to drive us somewhere private,” he says, “where the humans won’t see us. Is that okay?”

“You mean apes,” Niall says. “Isn’t that what you and your pack leader call human beings? Apes?”

Harry holds Niall’s eyes for a long moment. His face is smooth and soft and bristling with five o’clock shadow, sparse as it is. He looks very young. The rain washes the rosiness out of the apples of his cheeks and lightens up the color of his eyes so that the bottom of the lake seems much closer. His curls brush the soft skin of his throat. “We’re not wolves,” Harry says, finally, soft as a church whisper. “Not all the time, anyway.”

Niall relaxes into his seat. This old truck isn’t the most comfortable ride he’s ever had, but it might be the first one in ages that he and Zayn didn’t hotwire. Niall nods. “Yeah, sure. Just remember to keep it on neutral ground.”

“Not that there’s much left,” Harry mutters. “Between the two of us, I mean, I’m not –”

“I know,” Niall says. Zayn’s shoulders are spattered with rain and droplets run down his beautiful, terrific face. Niall pushes Zayn and his pack leader mind powers down as far as he can. “The packs are growing.” Werewolf populations are on the rise all over the area, though no one really knows why. Not even in New York or New Delhi is the concentration quite so high.

Niall thinks it might be a fluke. Hopes, anyway. Zayn thinks someone’s changing them on purpose. Trying to start a war, so Zayn’s pack and Louis’s destroy each other and make it easy on whoever wants the territory. And try as he might, Zayn can’t turn down a kid in need. He hadn’t turned his back on Niall when he found him bleeding to death on the side of the road in the middle of summer while Niall laid on his back and watched the buzzards circle overhead, closer and closer. So Niall owes him that, at the very least. And for letting Niall track him down after Zayn had moved off somewhere else. Niall doesn’t think of their relationship as him trying to pay Zayn back so much anymore. Sometimes, yeah. But it’s not like he swore some oath of fealty. For better or worse, his life is tied up in this, too.

Harry drives more slowly and cautiously than most wolves Niall knows. Niall props his chin up in his hand and watches Harry out of the corner of his eye. He eats and talks and drives with such an intent expression on his face, like he’s put his whole self behind it. Maybe that explains why he never has enough brainpower left over to watch his feet. His face cuts a nice, clean profile against the rain-spattered window behind, and his mouth looks especially soft. Something like hunger but not quite rumbles low in Niall’s stomach, and Niall wants to put his mouth on Harry’s neck, can’t tell if it’s to bite.

It’s probably not to bite.

Harry stops the truck on a back road running parallel to the river that cuts straight through town. Niall climbs out of the cabin of the truck and ambles over to the metal guard rail. He whistles lowly. He’s never seen the water level quite so high. Maybe this will be like another flood of Noah, he thinks. They and this town will be washed away, and whoever comes next will have a fresh start.

When he turns back around, Harry’s gone down to all fours. His fur is a soft brown color streaked with honey-colored highlights, and Niall thinks, not for the first time, that he makes a beautiful wolf. Harry puts his front paws together and lowers his head docilely. When he raises it again there’s a question in his eyes. Niall’s dropping down to the pads of his paws without another thought, and then it’s like being new to this again. Like being young. Their paws slip and slide on the wet grass and the thick mud bordering the edge of the lake and they might even get lost in the thick forest sprung up on either side of the river where it swells into a lake.

Harry doesn’t stop running, and Niall doesn’t stop chasing him, till they’re standing on top of the dam. Rain thrashes the dark blue lake behind and lush green pine trees thrust out of the deep brown soil like living spears, and on the other side of the dam, a man-made waterfall gives way to a sedate river. Nothing like the rushing one they’ve been running along, nothing like the one they live on top of.

“I used to send little boats down the river,” Harry suddenly says, “with my sister.” He’s resumed human form and the bandanna in his hair is a little askew, a wild smile on his face.

Niall’s shoelaces are untied. Harry looks almost anxious for a moment before he kneels down to do them up for him. Niall’s breath catches in his chest. Everybody knows about the last pack Zayn killed or ran out of town, but Niall didn’t think anyone knew why he did it with such vengeance. Niall still wakes up sometimes with the sound of the baseball bat smashing into his knee ringing in his ears, his stomach heaving.

Harry goes on, “Running was my favorite part about the change. You know? I’m not, like,” he gives a self-conscious little laugh, “I kind of, don’t make sense as a human, I guess. Like, not tripping over my own feet can be hard for me. But as a wolf, I’m,” he whistles. “You know? And running’s how I knew that. So when she died, I put a boat down the river, I ran down here to the dam to watch it come out the other side. It never did. Must’ve gotten crushed by the filters, or something.” Harry finishes doing up a little bow on Niall’s trainers. He stands up and brushes his hands off on his jeans. “Some things it’s better not to know, maybe.”

Niall shakes his head. “It’d have been the case whether you saw it or not. At least now you’re not wasting your time on something that’ll never happen.”

Everything in Harry’s expression slips down a little bit, and Niall realizes that he’s been looking at a heavily filtered version of Harry’s face this whole time. Now he sees the sadness, and he could kick himself for saying anything, he’s hardly in a place to give advice. “Sorry, I’m sorry, shit, I didn’t mean that, it’s not wasting time –”

Harry hooks his hands around the backs of Niall’s knees and in the fraction of a second where he’s falling, Niall thinks about how he should’ve known better. Then he drops into Harry’s lap and Harry’s mouth finds Niall’s. The kiss is rain-wet and cold and the ground feels solid and frigid as a block of ice, the earth frozen hard this far up north till summer comes round again, and Niall kisses back without mind for any of that. He doesn’t mean to kiss Harry so hard that he feels his mouth redden up, and he doesn’t plan on sinking his fingers in Harry’s soft curls like he’s been wanting to do for so many months – years, if he’s honest – now. But it happens all the same.

Niall always thought Harry would kiss sweet and slow, like the way he talks, but he mouths over Niall’s bottom lip and digs his teeth in in a way that’s not sweet at all. The way he licks over it after is, though. His hands push up under Niall’s flannel shirt, over his mostly empty stomach and the sharp line of his ribs. When Harry drags his nails down, Niall can imagine the sound, like piano keys jangling.

Niall fists his hands in Harry’s jacket and pulls him over on top of him. The soil is muddy and wet on Niall’s back, soothing to his overheated skin. Harry doesn’t complain when Niall rolls over him like he can tell some of the old panic of the buzzards circling overhead set in, like the sky was bent on crushing his chest. Harry spreads his knees easily and just kisses Niall through it, his fingers knotted in Niall’s bottle-blond hair.

The skin of Harry’s throat is soft and warm and smells perfume sweet on Niall’s palms, and he finds himself seeking his pulse point out with the flat of his tongue. Zayn, thus far quiet in the back of Niall’s mind, reasserts himself with a vengeance, and Niall’s mouth opens, his canines lengthening and growing thicker, stronger, his hands fit into the cuts of Harry’s biceps while he holds him down –

and he breaks away with a gasp. The shift, once it’s started, is almost impossible to turn back. Niall tears himself away from Harry and concentrates on stuffing the wolf back into its box, keeping it and Zayn’s control far, far away from Harry. Niall digs his fingers into the soil and holds on, holds on hard, like he’s caught in the gusts of some awful tornado.

When he’s sure he’s still human, Niall opens his eyes. Harry’s propped himself up on his elbows, still laid out just a few feet away. Niall can hear his heart beating rabbit time. The taste of Harry in Niall’s mouth suddenly turns bitter and sour and wrong. “Louis put you up to this, didn’t he,” Niall asks. It’s not really a question.

Harry sits up. The worst part is that even though he didn’t really mean the kiss, his mouth is still swollen and red, and his hair is still mussed and messy from Niall’s fingers. Niall can still feel Harry’s stubble against his own face, the soft pad of his thumb on the corner of his mouth like he wanted to touch the kiss with more than just his mouth.

Niall tries to think of something cutting and cruel to say, but he feels young and cold and dirty and worst of all, cheap. He knows Harry will go laughing back to Louis that Niall, who grew up in a trailer house and died in something not far removed from a rotting shed, ever thought he could mean it.

“Niall,” Harry says, soft. “I don’t want a war any more than you do.”

Niall looks down at his dirty hands. The cold is finally penetrating even his superhuman body heat and he wants to go home. He wonders if Harry and Louis expect him to go home with his tail between his legs so Zayn can chew him out, like he ought to.

Niall won’t. He’ll go in with his head high, because he won one over the wolf. He just raises an eyebrow at Harry.

“Louis might – he might find a way to work something out with Zayn,” Harry says. He swallows. “If I ask him to.” He gives Niall a meaningful look.

“No,” says Niall.

“Zayn will be safe,” Harry says, soft and persuasive. “The rest of your pack, your baby.”

Niall squeezes his hands together in his lap. “No,” he says, even though he knows he doesn’t mean it. Deep down, though, he knows. Zayn wouldn’t kill Niall’s mate.

“Think about it,” Harry just says. He mostly stumbles to his feet. He takes a step toward Niall, who stands up quick, even though he’s not sure why. It’d have been much easier for Harry to sneak a blade between his ribs while they were rolling around on the forest floor than now, with Niall’s defenses up. He’s known people who get off on stuff like that, though. It’s not the kind of knowledge that goes easy. Harry slips through the trees on all fours.

Niall allows himself one tiny, dry sob that nobody else will hear, and so that never happened at all. Then he lets the wolf out of the box, and Zayn guides him home. 

*** 

Zayn’s waiting outside their little rent house on the edge of town when Niall lopes up to the edge of the property and slows to regain human form. He never quite remembers what he looks like, or how it feels, to be human when he’s a wolf.

He never really notices the particular metallic smell of rain or the low, low hum of electricity in power lines, either, till he’s a wolf, though. Zayn always says that it’s something about a tradeoff, but Niall just thinks it’s something to do with the stuff that goes on within being of much greater importance than the stuff without.

That’s one conversation Zayn won’t have with Niall. Niall’s not sure why, and he knows better than to pry into the lives of people like him, people like Zayn, people who’ve packed so much more living into their years than the ordinary humans Niall watches at the grocery store with proper lists and impractical leather shoes. Niall thinks there’s something humane in the wolf. Zayn hopes there isn’t.

Niall stumbles over his loose shoe laces and crouches to tie them back up. He doesn’t realize that he’s basically kneeling at Zayn’s feet until he squints up at his face through cloaked sunlight filtering through the clouds like music carried from a distance over the wind, or a radio in another room. Niall makes his face as unapologetic as possible. 

“When I asked you to do some recon on the hipster pack, I didn’t mean for you to go poking around the beta’s mouth,” Zayn huffs. He looks like he wants to scowl, but it comes out closer to a lopsided grin instead. Dick.  

Niall feels himself flush, so he tucks his face down and concentrates on doing up his shoelaces. He reverts to the bunny ear method, just like his Ma taught him and Greg years and years and years ago. It’s her voice he hears in his head, her hands guiding his clumsy child’s fingers. Niall knows his face to be set like stone when he looks back up at Zayn.

Sometimes Zayn looks at Niall like he wants to shift into him, as a part of him, just meld the two of them into one person. Sometimes Zayn looks at Niall the way an animal might, assessing, considering. It’s not taboo to kill your own beta if they betrayed you. It’s only taboo if it turns out they haven’t.

Niall thinks of Harry, propositioning him in his way, making such a fine logical point. It gets lodged in Niall’s throat, a weight he can’t quite swallow around.

Zayn narrows his eyes. “Was that the first time he kissed you, Niall?”

Niall pops a cuticle into his mouth and starts chewing. The simmering hunger at the bottom of his gut amps up a little like a dog pulling at a leash. Niall could shift now and try to clamp his jaws around Zayn’s leg before Zayn jumps him himself. He could tuck and roll and be running in seconds; he’s almost mastered shifting at a run. Niall swallows.

“Don’t,” Zayn says, sounding defeated and soft. “Don’t look at me like that, for fuck’s sake, Niall. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Just him,” Niall can’t stop himself from saying. He doesn’t bring up the fact that Zayn would use Niall to do it, either, like he’s one of those katanas characters always have in the cartoons they watch on Adult Swim anytime they can afford to splurge on a cheap motel room. A weapon in Zayn’s arsenal.

“You could’ve done it yourself,” Zayn points out. “You wouldn’t have needed my help.”

Niall looks down at his hands in his lap. He can feel the ghost of Harry’s mouth on his, the soft brush of his stubble and his breath on Niall’s lips. _Louis might find a way,_ he can hear Harry saying.

“It doesn’t fucking matter,” Niall finally says. “He doesn’t know more than we suspected, I reckon. He knows there’s somebody putting pressure on us but he doesn’t know who, and he can’t stop Louis.”

“He said that?” Zayn asks. The soft pitter patter of rain splats onto Zayn’s crumpled leatherman, a thrift shop find they’d picked up somewhere between Portland and Eugene.

Rain drops run down Zayn’s face, as well, and something inside Niall relents. “I think we all know we’re not going to get out of this without somebody dying, Z,” Niall says. Harry’s suggestion is a niggling thought in the back of Niall’s mind, not something he’s going to let himself think about with Zayn’s eyes trained on his face. “Not without some help.”

Zayn holds his hand out to Niall, who takes it and stands up. His bad knee aches in the rain and his head and his heart feel like Harry didn’t so much kiss them as pluck them out and stomp on them, and Niall tells himself to stop being such a whiny little pup and suck it up.

“D’you know,” Zayn says, “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

Zayn shifts into wolf form like he’s made of water, like the transition is so easy and fluid for him. Zayn taught Niall a lot when they first packed up and made of themselves something more than a couple of grungy homeless kids, but he’s never quite managed to teach Niall how to do that. Niall thinks it might have something to do with Zayn preferring the beast over his real self. His human self.

Niall watches Zayn lope to the edge of the greenbelt sheltering their rundown house from the road for something to hold onto when he goes under and can’t remember how to find his way back to being human again. Then he slinks down to all fours and chases after.

Zayn takes the back way into town. He cuts through the forest with all the natural sensibility of someone born to the Pacific Northwest and all its looming trees, the smell of ocean and rain mingling in the air and something slow and hot and always moving underfoot, an earthquake everybody braces for and that some go their whole lives without feeling. When Niall falls asleep as a wolf, sometimes he thinks he can hear the tectonic plates miles and miles below the surface slowly grinding together, creating so much potential energy that when it finally snaps like a rubber band the whole Olympic Peninsula will shudder into the ocean and bury all this unreal werewolf drama to rest.

Niall shakes his head and picks up the cinnamon smell of leaves rotting underfoot, tangy tree sap and rain and the sweet rot of carrion, the hot sloshing blood of a herd of deer not too far off. Niall knows well enough that getting rid of all of them won’t resolve their problems. Territory is the most valuable form of currency, and they all have so much to lose.

Niall, especially. Most of the time, he’s grateful for that.

He follows Zayn on the familiar trail to the town of Mohegan, population: 6,102. 6,104 with Zayn and Niall, he supposes. It’s hardly more than a stone’s throw from the town Niall grew up in by wolf standards, but Niall wouldn’t dare to go back. Instead he stays just close enough to manage the trip running flat out in just a couple of hours in case – well. In case whatever emergency rises can wait two hours for him to get there.

It just seems safer, after all. For everyone. If he’s not there. Funny how he can’t quite pull himself away, either.

Zayn slows to a trot and is human and upright by the time he’s walking, Niall fumbling a bit coming out of his easy lope and tripping over his loose shoe laces. He just tucks the laces down into his shoes instead of stopping to tie them. Zayn’s broad shoulders cut a dark swathe out of the frustratingly mundane street, where a handful of adults hustle down the sidewalks with the hoods of their anoraks pulled up and unsettled looks on their faces. Niall thinks they know, even if they can’t feel it, that something a little unearthly is happening right under their noses. Even he can feel it.

“That’s not just us, is it,” Niall figures out, his elbow brushing Zayn’s on every other step, their hands tucked neatly into their pockets. The drizzling rain hasn’t let up and Niall takes note again of the strange almost-blindness of not being able to smell the bakery on the corner or the dingy mechanic’s shop.

It reminds Niall of walking along railroad tracks when he was a kid and feeling a train approaching from miles away, the tracks first moving the slightest bit and then shuddering until finally the train would blare out a whistle loud enough to make him slap his palms over his ears. He and Zayn seem to be drawn smoothly along mysterious unseen rail tracks.

Niall takes a deep breath to make sure his control won’t slip and he won’t suddenly sprout whiskers and a tail even on this dreary Tuesday afternoon, but when he reaches out to touch the wolf, he realizes he can’t find it. The rumbling thing inside of him has gone all quiet, soft and still, like it never was called to life at all. “Zayn,” Niall says, panic tinging his voice. It tastes a little like blood.

“I know,” says Zayn. He flashes Niall a tense smile, which on him is as good as a signal flare that he’s not feeling very happy. “That’s why I didn’t want to go this route sooner.”

Niall shoots a wary look over his shoulder and pulls the collar of his fleece jacket higher up around his neck. Losing the wolf, even as something he keeps locked up tight in a box that he’s tried hard not to let anything out of, is more unsettling than Niall ever thought it’d be. He wonders if whatever’s suppressing it can make this permanent, can take the wolf away.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Zayn chimes in. “Sorry, love. They can’t do that without killing you.”

“Have you ever thought of staying out of my head?” Niall asks, mostly out of scientific interest. Truth is, he leaves the door open for Zayn.

Zayn shrugs. “Nah,” he says. “It’s nicer than mine.”

Zayn leads them down a curving side street to the foot of the Cascades. The mountain range marches away like the undulations of the giant world ocean Niall read about in a library book one day when he was little and waiting for someone to come get him.

He used to feel like a library book himself just waiting for someone to come and check him out, and sometimes he still does. It was always a matter of time till whoever took him in – his parents, Greg, even Bressie and Laura, in their way – put him away again. Niall stares at Zayn’s clean, efficient profile, feels Zayn’s gentle mental fingertips soothing himself on Niall being right there beside him, and tries not to think, _Not this time._

Zayn leads them through a set of dingy double doors and right into a musty-smelling shop filled with clothes racks heaped with shoes and shelves full of glass wares, cooking utensils, and out of date game stations. “Goodwill,” Niall says. “Are we going shopping, Zaynie?”

“No,” Zayn says. The corners of his lips have already turned up at the nickname. “Not this time, although if you see something –” “I know,” Niall sighs – “We’re here for a couple of witches.”

“They have the power of magic at their disposal, and they’re kicking it at a thrift shop?” Niall asks. He drags his fingertips along the sleeves of a rack of wool blazers. The whole shop smells dusty in a way that would be suffocating if he was fully himself and the wolf was breathing inside of him. There are only two other patrons inside, an elderly woman with an actual cat for a hat and a bloke in his mid-thirties looking at a bin full of women’s sweaters.

“Isn’t that what you would do if you were fed by other peoples’ energy?” Zayn asks. One half of his mouth is tilted up higher in the other. On someone else, it would look like a smile, maybe, or even a smirk. On Zayn it looks ironic and self-deprecating, like, _I can’t believe what I’m saying, either._ Niall never feels closer to Zayn than when he remembers they were both human once.

Fully human, that is.

There’s a teenage girl behind the register, her inky black hair in a fishtail braid over her shoulder and a giant wad of bubblegum in her mouth. Niall can’t smell the gum, or hear her heart beat, and the strangest part is that he thinks that’s strange at all.

“Is that one of them?” Niall asks, with a nod toward the girl.

Zayn looks her over critically. A pall has set over his face while they’ve been inside; his skin looks paler, his eyes dimmer, and even that weird aura that’s always hung around him has shrunken back a little. He looks, Niall realizes, the way he would if he weren’t a wolf. “Nah,” says Zayn. “But they know we’re here. Just give it a minute. Look casual.”

So Niall fidgets with a rack of women’s sweaters and glances toward the main entrance and the double doors for donations and the door in the back every ten seconds. No one’s entered the shop, or left, since they came in, and the elderly lady doesn’t look very dangerous. Still, Niall thinks, and eyes the battered lamp in the corner. It’s been a long time since he had to think of weapons to use besides his teeth and claws.

“Wrong direction, love,” says a voice in his ear. Niall jumps and whirls, his heart suddenly banging all around his chest like it’s shaken free from the middle.

“Fuck!” he says.

“Well, that’s rude,” says that voice again. Niall turns again but there’s still no one there.

“So is not showing yourself,” Niall manages to get out. He curls his fingers into claws but there’s no tough nail there, and his skin is bare and pink, soft-looking. God. He can feel a gentle breeze on the back of his neck and his heart pounding in his chest, adrenaline working overtime to make his ears and eyes work better, and Niall realizes for the first time how little it all means in the face of what he could do if he was really himself.

On an ordinary day, he’d already have been a wolf. And there’s no telling who he’d have attacked first.

“Zayn,” Niall says.

“He can’t hear us,” someone says. Niall turns, not really expecting to see anyone, at this point, and there’s a girl stood in front of him. Her blond hair is lilac-tipped, and her bright blue eyes are heavily outlined in eyeliner. She looks like the sort of girl that used to vaguely intimidate Niall at malls he’d slouch around in with Zayn trying to peddle marijuana to kids outside of Seattle. “It’s just you and me, love.”

“Perrie,” Niall snaps. The balloon in his chest filling with fear pops, and all he’s left with is a lot of stress. “What the hell, you know I hate it when you do that.” Niall glances around just to take stock. Usually if he takes his eyes off anything even for a moment, it’ll be different by the time he looks back. The sun was just setting when he and Zayn stepped in, but now the light is steeped in the color of frost like it’s the blue hour. Niall doesn’t think that he’d be able to hear anyone else’s heart even if he _was_ a wolf right now.

Niall’s working theory is that Perrie is a vampire, but she’s never tried to suck his blood or rip his heart out, so he’s not sure. All he knows is that she usually appears unexpectedly, and not with any good news. “Is it time to run?”

Perrie gives a customary little curtsy. “Hey, you know I’d love to talk, but not till you put that down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Niall looks down at his hand and discovers a battered ceramic pear in it – the nearest blunt object. He doesn’t even remember picking it up. “Sorry,” he says, and quickly puts it back on the metal shelf with a clatter.

Perrie shrugs. “You didn’t hit me with it. I thought you might be interested in buying it. I’m sure it’d fit with your whole homeless werewolf aesthetic.”

“Not nearly as well as it fits with your bag lady look,” Niall says sweetly, and Perrie scowls. “What do you want, anyway? We’re doing recon.”

“That’s not why you’re here,” Perrie says, and moves on before Niall can ask any questions. He can’t say he looks forward to her little pop-ins when he comes away from them mind-bogglingly frustrated, but he can’t say that she hasn’t saved his hide a time or two, either. Once it was from cops busting in on the car he and Zayn stole. Perrie appeared just a minute or two before the cop knocked the butt of his flashlight against the glass. Another time, she’d led him through the forest’s maze while he waited for the silver bullet blood poisoning to bleed out. “But you don’t know that yet. Do you?”

“Depends,” Niall says, narrowing his eyes. He looks around for Zayn. He’s stood in the middle of the racks of shoes, his head turned toward Niall like he’d just had the sense of danger before he was frozen. “How come you do that to him?” he asks.

Perrie nods like the question is some sort of confirmation. She pulls a tatty journal out of one of the innumerable pockets on her ankle duster and flips it open to the middle. She drags her finger down the page like she’s looking for her spot. “So that’s where we are. Ah. Well, whatever.”

“That’s not a map,” Niall says.

Perrie looks at him like he’s just said the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Fortunately, Niall’s used to it. “Sure it is,” Perrie says. “Did you know the Latin _ibi_ is used to mean both _where_ and _when_?”

“No,” says Niall, with finite patience. “Sorry, I didn’t have much time to brush up on my Aristotle between getting turned into an animal and chatting with you.”

Perrie rolls her eyes. She looks very definitely _other,_ and somehow she looks like she fits amongst this giant rummage sale of other peoples’ things. It makes Niall’s head hurt. “Aristotle was Greek. Anyway, where was I? I mean, when?” She snickers at her own lame joke. “Right. The witches sent me a message – yes, they knew you were coming, haven’t you been listening? _Where_ and _when,_ Niall, pay attention – and told me to tell you to come back.”

“Come back?” Niall asks. He glances toward Zayn’s frozen figure like he might offer some assistance. “What, like another time? When?”

“No,” Perrie says. “Not with him. Bring Harry. Tonight, I think it is. Or maybe it’s tomorrow? Well, try tonight, and if it doesn’t work, then tomorrow.”

Niall tilts his head, trying to see Perrie the way he’s just seen Zayn, the way he’s afraid to look into the mirror and see himself. He can’t quite peer past the supernatural gloss on her skin and find the human beneath. Maybe she wasn’t ever human. Maybe this is what being human looks like on her. “Am I ever going to know?” Niall asks.

Perrie’s face softens the slightest bit. She touches the pad of her index finger to the middle of his forehead. A wry smile makes her ageless face look as young as Niall’s ever seen it. “Listen to the Greeks,” Perrie says. “ _Know thyself.”_

She’s gone before Niall can work up a response.

“What – how’d you get over here so fast?” Zayn asks. Niall just shrugs. He’s given up trying to make the weird pieces fit in the even stranger puzzle of his life.

“I see we’ve got some guests,” says the elderly woman, rounding the corner of the shoe aisle. The longer he looks at her, the less lined her skin appears. Maybe she just seemed old from far away. But no – now her hair is brown, not gray, and the cat draped over her shoulders lands softly on the floor and winds itself around her shoulders. Niall blinks, and shakes his head, and even though he _knows_ he was looking at an old woman a moment ago he can’t quite remember what she looked like.

Zayn angles himself in front of Niall, equal parts protective and possessive. “Witch,” Zayn says, and the young woman bows her head in acknowledgement.

“Might as well come on back,” she says. “I can tell there’s something you want.”

She leads them through a doorway with the door and hinges removed, a curtain strung up in its place, to the back of the store. Moldering cardboard boxes are heaped high in perilous stacks, and even more garbage bags full of people’s old shit lie around filling every available square foot of space. It reminds Niall of the footage he’s seen of the trenches in World War I in a strange way, like these bags and boxes are all that’s left of things people used to want.

He reaches deep inside himself for the dented lockbox that he keeps the wolf in, just wanting to feel if it’s there, what’s happened to it, and the wolf nips at the tips of his mental fingers. The wolf is there, alright, just held back, buried deep.

“It’s a precaution,” the witch says, glancing over her shoulder at Niall. “We’ve a great deal of power, but even you would be surprised what a particularly determined wolf can do.”

Niall furrows his brow. He’d be surprised? He’s not so sure. He’s seen enough hellbent wolves to last a lifetime, actually.

“Don’t,” Zayn says, when Niall opens his mouth to respond. “They charge you for answering your questions, don’t give them anything to hold over you.”

The witch pauses at another empty doorway curtained off from view. Her face slips sideways into something like a scowl, or perhaps a smirk; the hair rises off the back of Niall’s neck. Something odd and slippy happens to her face, and when her expression eases into a smile, wrinkles crease her face like rivers cutting through a plain. Niall shakes his head like that’ll stop time from slipping off of her like oil. “Don’t be frightened,” she tells Zayn. “Whatever your fate may be, it was decided long before you brought yourself and the pup to my door.”

“Pup?” Niall repeats. He’s nineteen, he’s been taking care of himself since he was twelve, he’s not a _pup._

“Sh,” Zayn just says, the corners of his mouth twitching up like he can’t help himself, and Niall breathes in the musty exhalation of peoples’ tossed off old junk and just follows Zayn into the defunct manager’s office at the back of an old Goodwill.

The cat on the witch’s shoulder nimbly jumps down and lands on the aged wooden floorboards as soundlessly as a feather. Two other cats, one on a desk in the middle of the room and the other spread in the weak evening sunlight drifting through the open window, lift their heads.

The witch seats herself on the other side of the battered and chipped wooden desk that wouldn’t look out of place at the high school Niall spent all of two years at before his ordinary life got turned inside out. “So,” Zayn starts, trying to get a grip on the situation, lead it, the way that makes him feel safe.

Niall scopes out the environment while Zayn handles the potential threats. His eyes catch on the sun sinking below the horizon out the dingy window. Strange, but the sun seems soft and melted, like the egg of a yolk that’s not quite been fried all the way through. Like an idiot, Niall stares straight into the sun, watching the light trickle out of the middle of the egg yolk surface like a river of molasses pouring out of the sun and filling the streets.

“What,” Zayn says sharply. “What are you doing to him?”

“Me?” asks the witch. “Nothing.”

Thick, syrupy gold sunlight rolls over the blacktop roads and cement sidewalks and the grass in the park all the same. It reminds him of the mist that rolls in over the water at the docks and creeps up the narrow, angled streets of San Francisco down in the bay. Like mist, Niall has the particular feeling that the broken egg yolk sunshine isn’t doing any damage, just ghosting over the top.

Light, he thinks distantly, and wonders if maybe he’s not watching the last hundred, thousands sunsets all laid over the top of each other like transparencies on a projector.

He manages to squeeze his eyes shut just in time for the broad golden light of morning to break through the window, and three additional forms fill the room like liquid poured out of a glass, like maybe they were always there or not even really here at all, Niall doesn’t know which.

“Boys,” says the witch sat behind the desk, the one Niall thinks – he doesn’t know, now – that he saw just a few minute ago, in the late afternoon, between racks of clothes. “The coven. Coven, customers.”

“They don’t look like much,” says one doubtfully. Her hair is long and dark and thick, and the silver powder smell of them like gunshot fills the room so strongly that Niall covers his face to gulp down a couple of rattling coughs.

The witches gather round the desk while the light outside fades until the cookie cutter neighborhoods outside the window are drizzled in everyday sunset again.

“Right,” Zayn says, struggling for control. “A reading. That’s what we want. Our fortunes.”

“One reading?” one of the witches ask skeptically. “Sorry, no can do. Two futures, that’s two readings, sorry love.”

Niall starts nodding, but Zayn reaches over and puts his hand on Niall’s knee. Niall colors. He never really – he’s never been _in love_ with Zayn, like he’s seen so many other people do. But maybe part of him wishes that Zayn would love _him_. Just because it’d feel special. “Just me, then,” he says.

Disobeying his alpha’s orders would only serve to make Zayn look weak in front of them, they’ve talked about it and Niall knows better, but he just. He has so much to lose, too. Niall thinks of the picture he has carefully sewn inside his pillow of Theo chasing bubbles in the park near Bressie’s pub, and Laura tucking a long lock of her hair behind her ear before she slips him an illicit pint, and he has everything to lose.

“No,” says Niall. “It’s my life, too, Z, c’mon – it could help.”

Zayn bristles in that unspeakable way he has, like a turtle sinking into its shell. He narrows his eyes and says, “I said no, Niall.” His voice thrums with power, like a leash pulling on the collar around Niall’s neck, and – nothing happens. It’s not that Zayn’s not pushing, it’s that he hasn’t got his alpha powers around him.

Niall thinks, briefly, of the punishment Zayn could choose to inflict on him later. He can still feel the golden sunshine splitting out of the sun, its warmth on his face, the animal in the box in his chest awed silent. “Fine,” says Niall. “Okay.”

Zayn nods once. Niall thinks only he can spot the way Zayn’s jaw is tight, like he really wasn’t sure. Funny. Niall wasn’t, either.

“We’ll do a Tarot reading,” the witch says.

Niall shifts in his uncomfortable folding chair. Zayn’s sat beside him in a wooden one with one of the leg braces broken off, and two of the witches are sat on mismatched barstools. “What’s your name?” Niall asks the one nearest him. She looks young, for whatever that’s worth, and beautiful enough that she might’ve just stepped off a runway.

“To name a thing is to give you power over it,” she says, not unkindly.

Niall reckons that’s a nice way of saying he’d better off not ask.

The witch takes out a deck of Tarot cards and spreads them across the desktop. They look just like ordinary cards. Even the witches don’t seem too keen on what comes out of them; two are studying Niall, which makes him want to bite his nails and not to, in equal measure, and the other one is chewing gum and checking her nails. Only the first one pays Zayn any mind at all.

“You didn’t agree on a price,” Niall murmurs, the moment he thinks of it.

“There’s only one price,” Zayn says, and selects a card from the fan.

The witch takes it, nods once, and shows it to Zayn. It’s a picture of a hand holding a stick with little branches coming off. It looks like an unpruned baseball bat, or a bit of poor campfire wood, nothing more. “What is it?” Zayn asks. His voice is calm and level, even though he sounds like he’s speaking from somewhere very deep and protected inside himself.

“The ace of wands,” the witch studying her nail answers, “reversed.” The other witch puts it face-up on the desktop and sits back in her seat, her face pensive.

Niall leans forward to see it better. “What’s it mean?” he asks.

The witches give a collective shrug. “Doubt, self-consciousness, misplaced power,” the one nearest Niall rattles off, her eyes flicking up to Zayn, “and weight.”

Niall gives into the urge to chew his nails. Outside, the sun has very near settled beneath the horizon. Something about the unearthly glow of moonlight makes the witches’ faces seem too bright, too _other,_ and Niall would very much like to get a move on.

“So you know,” Zayn says, sitting forward. “You know who I am, and why I’m here.”

“You seek aid,” says one of the witches. Niall looks round but can’t quite tell who’s spoken. The voice seems to have come from nowhere, and everywhere.

Zayn nods briskly. “There’s a war on your doorstep,” he says. “You’ll have to forgive me for assuming you’d care.”

The witch from the shop pushes the card closer to Zayn. When the witches speak, they seem to all speak at once, though their mouths don’t move. “This is your fate. You know what you have to do.”

“What?” Zayn asks, desperation leaking into his voice at last. Niall tries to lean into the wall between their hearts like a dog leaning its head against his owner’s shin, but the connection is buried too far down to reach.

“Submit,” says the witch, and the sun winks out beneath the mountains, and the coven vanishes.

***

“Fuck,” Zayn swears. There’s a cigarette caught between his lips and he scrabbles around in his pockets for a lighter. “That was some shit. Fucking load of bullshit.”

Niall gives the area a general sweep to make sure he’s the only one who can hear Zayn. The bus stop provides only the barest shelter against the unpredictable drizzling rain, and Niall’s shivering in his flannel coat. He and Zayn and a bloke with silver pebbling his black beard are the only people in sight, feels like the only people left alive. The wolf hardly thrashes against the bars Niall’s set against it, seems cowed, somehow.

“You got a lighter?” Zayn finally asks, in desperation, and no, Niall hasn’t.

Zayn sighs, then turns sharply on his heel and marches off without looking back, confident that Niall will follow. Niall watches the broad span of his shoulders fade into the distance and thinks, _I could go back._ He can’t get the molten gold image of time flowing over itself out of his mind, or the heavy weight of the witch’s gaze. What had Perrie told him? _Go back._ He knows, now. His business isn’t finished yet.

“Does that card mean something you’re not telling me?” Niall calls.

Zayn slows to a stop, then turns to look at Niall. “Mate,” says Zayn, “I wish I could tell you.”

It’s not hardly an answer, but it seems good enough. Niall trots after him.

“I should’ve guessed,” he’s murmuring into his collar just a couple of blocks later. Zayn’s taken them straight to his favorite Texaco. Well, really it isn’t the Texaco he favors. It’s the employee inside.

Liam’s not behind the register when they walk in, the bell tinkling overhead. Niall’s still scoping out the place when Zayn steps forward as if magnetized, his long legs taking him to Liam, who’s stocking Diet Dr Pepper in the back. He’s wearing the usual hiking boots with jeans and a flannel shirt combo that half the guys in the Pacific Northwest wear, but something about Liam makes the outfit look soft, worn-in. Not for the first time, Niall thinks him well-suited to this fluorescent gas station and the faint sheen of grease that’s layered over everything, and Zayn mooning over him like they’re ordinary stupid kids.

Niall leans on the counter and fiddles with the lighter he knows Zayn will forget to buy otherwise and pretends he can’t overhear their conversation.

“Zayn!” Liam. “Didn’t expect to see you tonight, although why wouldn’t I, huh?” He laughs. “You look peaky, have you eaten today?”

Yes, actually, they had lovely deer steaks very, very rare, Niall imagines Zayn saying. “Had some chips,” Zayn says instead, to Liam’s motherly clucking.

“Don’t tell the manager,” says Liam, setting aside a clinking crate of beer to restock, “but I saved today’s leftovers for you.”

The Texaco has one of those booths like hotdog vendors at a ballgame that sells fried chicken and French fries. Zayn’s always coming home from his turn to do patrols smelling of it, so that Niall knows he’s stopped in to see Liam on his way home, and he doesn’t even have it in him to begrudge him. Niall’s whole life is two hundred miles away, but Zayn deserves this. They all deserve something.

Liam brings out a doggy bag of fried chicken breast and chicken legs and crispy French fries. Niall’s stomach gives a rumble. He always ate a lot, and then he became a wolf and now it’s like he can’t ever get full. Zayn offers the greasy paper bag to Niall, who takes it as an invitation to enter the conversation, too.

“Both you guys look rough,” Liam says, frowning. “Sure you’re not coming down with something?”

Niall just waves it away and tears into a handful of fries. He can smell the blood soughing through Liam’s veins, and the overwhelmingly greasy gas station food, and spilled gasoline outside. Zayn’s particular scent comingles with the rest. It smells dirty and too close and too far away, all at once, and it smells like as much home as Niall’s known.

Zayn and Liam go back and forth about the Seattle Seahawks, and the weather, and the latest issues of X-Men and Spiderman, while Niall watches rain hit the glass window and slide down.

 _Bring Harry,_ he’s hearing Perrie say, and wonders how on earth to do it.

The thing is, Zayn didn’t want to know his future – he hadn’t said, but Niall knows Zayn, and Zayn doesn’t want his future to belong to anyone but himself – and Niall, well. Niall reckons he already knows. His best hope is just to secure Theo’s future before whatever happens to him, happens.

Liam laughs big and loud and heartfelt; it reminds Niall of the belly laughs the guys who play Santa always do on TV as soon as Thanksgiving’s over and the season of materialism sets in.

“Well, take care, man,” says Zayn. “We’ll see you later.”

Niall clears his throat quietly. “Your lighter, man.”

“Oh,” Zayn says, suddenly abashed. “Yeah.”

Zayn cups his hands around the bud and starts off in the opposite direction of the bus stop, so Niall knows he’s feeling secure enough in his wolf powers to avoid public transit. Not that someone wouldn’t hunt them down in public, but it makes for a much bigger mess to clean up and, in the end, it doesn’t even seem worth it.

Zayn’s pack is a net cast too wide and too thin, so all of his pack members are more or less adrift. The thing to do would be tighten up the boundaries and limit his territory, but if he yields even one of his outposts, there’s no doubt Louis would take it. An impasse. _Submit,_ Niall hears again, and bites the inside of his cheek.

If Zayn’s alpha authority were recognized, the witches might be more inclined to help them out. The fair folk might reinforce their boundary lines, and crossing into their territory for another wolf pack would be suicide. If.

“Don’t worry so much,” Zayn tells Niall that night at home. It’s just a shitty little rent house, one bathroom with a leaky shower and two bedrooms stacked on top of each other with a tiny kitchenette off the futon Zayn uses as a bed, but it’s something. Zayn shucks his shirt off his head, revealing his bony chest and his life’s story in tattoos. He curls up beside Niall in Niall’s bed, his skin soft and warm. Niall’s never been in love with Zayn, but he thinks it might be nice to be in love with someone who could love him back _._ Maybe it’d feel less lonely. “Whatever those witches say, it’s all bullshit. We take care of our own, yeah?”

Niall nods. “Yeah, yeah.”

Zayn drops off within minutes, like always, so Niall is left staring up at the shadow of tree branches on the ceiling all by himself. He can imagine the creaking, scratching sound they’d make leaving real marks on the ceiling. Trees probably have a lot to say.

Niall mistakes the first _plink_ as a branch knocking against the grimy window. Then he hears the sound again, and then again, so he slides out of bed and tiptoes on bare feet to crouch beneath the window. He takes a deep breath, and then he inches his head over the sill to peek out.

The tree makes long shadows on the ground, and the laundry they forgot to take down – Zayn’s shredded jeans, a hoodie of Niall’s he found in a donation bin, pairs of boxers and socks they can’t bother to keep separate anymore – wave in the breeze, casting the yard in darkness. Niall slows his breath, tries to keep his heart rate from climbing, and Harry steps into the broad view of moonlight.

“Fuck,” Niall whispers, under his breath. He raises his head just enough to be seen and Harry waves, motioning, _Come down._

For some reason, Niall thinks of the old Rapunzel story, and how it’d be such a foolish thing to leave this safe place for someone he hardly knows. Then he shakes his head, slides his hiking boots on, and tiptoes down the stairs.

A pang of self-consciousness only hits him when he’s pushing the creaky screen door open and stepping out into the yard. The white shirt he’s wearing is peppered with holes from that time he got caught on barbed wire fence, and his jeans are at least two sizes too big, and his leather belt is peeling. The house doesn’t look too bad without the light of day on it, but there’s no mistaking that it’s less than a year from being condemned. Niall makes himself set his shoulders and lift his chin. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see what you decided,” Harry answers, his eyes flicking over Niall once and settling on his face. He doesn’t seem the least bit interested in the house or anything else, which bothers Niall more than it should.

Niall shivers in the wind blowing down from Canada. He can taste evergreens and firs and pines on the breeze, the iron-tang smell of snow, and misses the windswept desert with a fierce and sudden pang. He wants to say, “Not like this,” and he wants to ask, “Will you be miserable?” and instead he says, “I was sorry to hear about your sister.”

Harry stiffens all over like someone’s petrified him, his face shuttering closed till Niall’s looking at his own face as if through a mirror, and he doesn’t know how to undo it. “Thanks,” Harry says tonelessly.

Niall shivers again. His hoodie is blowing in the wind just a few steps from where Harry’s standing, so Niall makes himself move forward, unclip the clothespins from the line. By the time Niall’s shoved his head through the the hoodie and pushed the hood off his forehead, Harry looks more like himself.

“The witches,” Niall starts, the backs up, explains, “Me and Zayn went to visit the witches today. Er,” Niall stops. He’s not sure quite how much to share with Harry, is all. Harry nods like it’s not unexpected, so Niall goes on, “Someone – I mean, they asked us to come back.”

Harry’s eyes narrow like he’s not quite sure he believes, or maybe like he just doesn’t want to be bothered. Niall’s not sure what Harry had in mind when he propositioned him a fake relationship in return for armistice, but it probably didn’t involve running Niall’s weird friends’ errands.

“Okay,” is all Harry says. Zayn bursts into his wolf form like he doesn’t like containing it, and Niall lets it out of the box that he keeps it in, but Harry slips down to all fours like he’s taking the steps down into a heated pool. It makes something tense and uneasy quiver in Niall’s stomach – not upset, just interested.

Niall keeps track of Harry through the woods by smell, since his nose works so much better than his eyes. On his own, Harry smells like citronella candles and sunscreen and the mangos Niall picks up at the store just to breathe them in. It’s not a difficult scent to hang on to, all things considered.

Harry draws to a stop and transforms back into human shape without so much as panting. It gives Niall pause. He’s never seen Harry as a threat before because he doesn’t _look_ like one. He wears tatty vintage band shirts or oversized jumpers, and he’s usually hunched forward as if bowed over by something. More than that, there’s something in his face Niall has never quite been able to be afraid of. The purse of his lips or the way his eyes look so translucent, like nothing gets out but light. Maybe that assessment was wrong.

“It’s just practice,” Harry murmurs, like he’s reading Niall’s mind, so Niall lopes up to two feet and pulls on the Goodwill door.

It’s locked.

“Do you know how to break in?” Harry asks interestedly.

Niall pats his pockets. No, he doesn’t have his lockpick kit. “Do you?” he asks.

Harry just shakes his head.

“C’mon, let’s check the windows,” Niall offers. He doesn’t want to let Perrie down but more than that he doesn’t want to be left looking the fool, empty-handed, in front of Harry. Harry trails after him gamely enough when Niall steps off the pavement and pushes past the lush shrubbery gathered round the Goodwill. Maybe it’s bad gardening, or maybe it’s very good, Niall can’t tell. He just knows there’s an awful lot of greenery.

“Here we go,” Niall says, stopping at the first window. He reaches up and grabs the windowsill by his fingertips, and then it’s the small matter of hauling himself up to check the latch. “Hah,” he says.

“Got it?” Harry asks. Niall chances a glance down at him. Harry’s stood with one hand on his hip, his bottom lip caught between his thumb and forefinger. “Is it locked?”

Niall braces his toes against the wall and leverages the rusted window open with all the strength he has. The window gradually creaks open, and Niall pushes himself up and over the ledge. He turns back to offer Harry a hand up, unthinking, and is a little surprised when Harry takes it. He clambers over the sill less than gracefully, and Niall thinks, _Practice._

They land in the children’s section. Niall stays crouched down the way he’d landed till his ears and nose relay all the information he needs: no, nobody’s been here, and no, nobody’s moving around right now.

Niall’s not so worried about the coven as he is anyone else. He reckons the witches have their ways of remaining unseen. It’s other wolves or vampires or hunters he’s worried about.

“Has Louis been to see them?” Niall asks, mainly to make conversation. He keeps his voice low and quiet, a bizarre church whisper in this intimidatingly still and silent place. Moonlight filters dimly through the little windows, but Niall’s eyes are keener than a regular person’s.

Harry shakes his head slowly. “No. His relationship with witches is – complicated.”

“And you?” Niall asks, holding his breath. It’s something he and Zayn have talked about only in the latest early hours, watching the sun rise over their plates of fried eggs and cups of coffee – Denny’s has a special if you know how to work the menu the right way – when Zayn lets his guard down an inch.

“He was born,” Zayn told Niall that first night he’d seen Harry for what he really was, and Louis too, “not bit. Why he’s not the alpha, I don’t know.”

Harry prods at a rack of leather jackets like he’s thinking about going through them. “No,” he shrugs, then looks away. “Never had much reason to.”

Niall thinks there’s every reason to want to know one’s fate, but he doesn’t say as much. Just says, “Over here,” and leads Harry past the first curtained doorway, through the heaps of boxes and trash bags like decomposing bodies, through to the back of the shop.

Nobody’s there. Not even the cats that were maybe people, or maybe just people made to look like cats, Niall doesn’t know. He rocks on his heels, flustered, and Harry says, “Moonlight. Why not close the windows, hm?” He takes one, two long strides over to the shutters and twists them shut, and the room fills with four witches like dust of motes floating on a beam of sunlight made something solid.

“God’s sakes,” Niall says.

One of the witches snickers. “I see you got our message,” she says. Her eyes flick over to Harry. Her gaze is heavy and intense, and Niall’s fervently grateful that he’s not the focus of it just yet. “And you brought Harry.”

Harry bows his head respectfully. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says. “My sister told me a lot about you.”

Something strange passes between the witches. It reminds Niall of kids playing hot potato with a bean bag, the way they all shift their weight and move their arms like they’re the one with the hot potato in their hands even when they’re not. Like what concerns one, concerns them all. “Thank you,” is all the one Niall thought could’ve walked off a runway said. Not for the first time, he wishes he knew their names.

“You wanted your fortune read, didn’t you?” asks one. She rolls up her sleeves like she means to start hard labor, and it’s sort of nervy, to be honest. Niall exchanges a look with Harry, whose face has settled into pleasant curiosity. Niall wonders how he wears the wolf, whether it’s a struggle for him to quell it in times of stress or if he’s too experienced.

“Oh,” Niall says, realizing. He can still shift.

The other witch nods. “Our best trick doesn’t work when the moon’s out. That one’s all yours.”

“Sit down, please,” says the first witch. Niall and Harry both take a seat across from her like she’s their principal or something. Belatedly, Niall wonders if Harry graduated, or if this life got to him first. Although maybe being born into it…maybe he didn’t have to pick. “You’d like your fortune read, yeah?” she asks Niall.

“We can read either one of you,” the other witch says, the one with the raspy voice. She and the others sit around the desk again, but this time their faces are interested, alert. Niall finds himself chewing on the inside of his cheek.

He looks at Harry, who’s looking steadily back at him. His face is like a mirror again, all unreadable and unknowable, and Niall wonders if maybe what he’s seeing is fear. “I’ll do it,” he says.

“Hold on,” says Harry, surprising him. “What’s the price?”

Niall thinks of Zayn. _There’s only one price._ “A favor,” answer the witches, sounding as though the voice might be one of them or all of them again. Niall glances at Harry, who merely offers him a shrug. Niall rubs his palm on his jeans, and then he offers it to the witches to view.

They link hands. Even Harry is drawn into the circle, his left hand clasped around Niall’s embarrassingly sweaty palm, the raspy-voiced witch’s hand on his shoulder. “Now,” she says, “think of the question you’d like answered.”

There’s so many questions Niall would have answered. _What happened to Greg? Is Theo safe?_ He thinks of Harry, and his _Never had much reason to,_ and understands that some questions you don’t really want answered. Niall takes a deep breath, and thinks, _Can I help?_ Even he’s not quite sure what he means. With Zayn, and Zayn’s alpha problem, and the way he’d love the goofy cashier from the Texaco so well. Bressie and Laura and them taking in Niall’s nephew because neither of them have anyone else, and Greg, somewhere out there or maybe dead. Maybe he means it in all those ways. Together, they all bend their heads over Niall’s palm.

Nothing happens.

“I don’t think,” Niall starts, wondering if maybe he should’ve washed up or moisturized beforehand, and then his brain turns into a radio receiver. Images pour through Niall’s brain like water through a sieve, there for a moment and then gone the instant Niall’s aware of it. Tree branches swaying in the wind, the soothing rumble of the car engine against his cheek while he lays down in the backseat, the simple delight of taking his father’s hand and swinging from it. Some part of Niall is aware that he’s living his own life out of order.

Then he sees himself flat on his back on the side of the highway, buzzards circling lower and lower overhead, and his chest tightens up in dawning panic. The longer he looks, the faster the images fly by like the film is accelerating toward beginning and end from the midpoint right now. Then everything stops, and the movie playing out across Niall’s eyes contracts to a single point, and he can see the witches on either side of him again, and Harry, sat forward in his seat, his face pale as a ghost.

In his mind there’s just one final image of himself, and Harry, and Harry’s mouth kissing up his throat. The way they’re kissing – the way he’s kissing, Niall thinks, that’s himself – is almost indecent to look at. He feels like a voyeur watching Harry’s palm slide down over his ass. The vision-Niall’s hands twitch and his eyes gleam, and claws sprout from his fingertips, and somewhere far outside of himself Niall can see the future crumble into dust like a power outage spreading across the city. At the epicenter is Niall and Harry.

Niall’s face feels so hot he’s surprised he hasn’t burst into flame. Somehow these witches must’ve dipped into his head, found a stupid daydream. Christ. Niall wants to melt into the floor and disappear forever. What the hell must Harry be thinking?

“No,” says Niall. It’s all he can come up with. He clears his throat. _Can I help?_ he’d asked. “The answer was no?”

“The answer,” says the witches with that eerie, echoing voice they share, “was yes.”

Niall and Harry wind up sat across from each other at a dingy Formica table in the Waffle House on the edge of town. Rain lashes against the windows and beats a relentless rhythm into Niall’s brain. He thinks he’d like to lie down and take a nap. He thinks he might never sleep again, if he has to dream of those visions.

Harry looks very pale under the fluorescent lights. His hair curls limply over his forehead and drips down his collar, and in spite of himself, Niall thinks about dragging his tongue over Harry’s collarbone and licking it up.

 _It’s not fair_.

As soon as Niall’s had the thought, he’s even more frustrated with himself. Maybe if he had better luck he’d have a crush and it’d go away, or he’d get to put up with it in peace. Instead, he’s got a coven of witches telling him that his best hope for helping everyone he cares about is carrying on this charade with Harry. Unless it’s not a charade at all, but even then, they’ve showed him themselves: it doesn’t end well. And still Niall doesn’t know what Harry thinks. Maybe he’s nauseated by the prophecy of his future. Maybe he’s frightened for the futures of his friends.

Jesus Christ.

If Niall’s sense of smell wasn’t so suppressed by the rain, he thinks he’d be able to smell the graveyard dirt on either side of his life. Yesterday, tomorrow. He’s starting to understand better the way the witches work. It’s all the same, to them.

“We don’t have to do it,” he tells Harry, at length. He’s ordered a cup of coffee and a plate of eggs fried hard even though he’s not sure he has enough cash to pay for them. The coffee’s surface is covered in a light film of oil, so Niall dumps three packets of fake sugar into it. The egs smell burnt. “I mean, what they do, they see the future, right? Or whatever. Us, like.” He licks his lips. _Falling in love._ What a load of bullshit, obviously. “We can just…not make that future happen.”

Harry uses his plastic coffee stirrer to line up the spilled granules of sugar. “You asked if you could help, didn’t you?”

Niall’s head snaps up before he can think better of it.

Harry has the decency to look abashed. “Look, I wasn’t the one who cracked your mind open like a book, was I? I just…their answer was yes. It’s the right thing to do.”

“That’s enough for you?” Niall asks. He can’t explain why he’s brooking so much argument with this, with Harry, with the witches and their coven and their prophecies. Maybe some part of him just always thought he’d be able to go back to a normal life. This feels too much like admitting he’d never have had that anyway. “Someone tells you ‘this is your fate,’ you believe them?”

Harry sits back in his chair and angles his head slightly, and the youth sloughs away from the angles of his face, and some of the sweetness, and he looks regal and cold and unafraid. “If it’s the answer I wanted to hear,” he says, “then yes.”

Niall shakes his head. He doesn’t argue any further, though. Feels like he knows better, is all. Niall would do just about anything for Theo and Zayn and Greg. He probably would’ve told Harry yes even if the witches warned them against it. Maybe that’s all fate really is, doing whatever you had planned in the first place, and hoping it works out. If you get what you want, it’s fate. If you don’t, then it must be fate, too.  

Besides, what kind of options does Niall have? Tell Harry no and wait for Louis’s pack to kill him, and Zayn, and everything Niall cares about?

They pick at their eggs in silence while the lone waitress cleans up after the guy who sat at the bar. The chef’s spatula _tings_ against the metal top of the grill, and the rain lessens slightly. Harry puts his hands on the edge of the table and pushes his chair back to get up. “So.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in,” Niall says. He sits back in his seat and tilts his face up to Harry, who’s stood over him. He’s so close that his shadow blots out the dingy overhead lights, and Niall could be forgiven for thinking that he looks soft, and sweet, and harmless.

Harry hesitates like he’s thinking of bending down to kiss Niall goodbye, so Niall looks out the window instead, his cheeks flaming. Everything inside of him is disappointed, and letdown, and fiercely _wanting,_ so he bites the inside of his lip and says nothing. He sees Harry put down enough cash to cover both their bills and nod once, in a satisfactory sort of way, in the window’s reflection. Then he steps out into the rain, and Niall loses sight of him.

Niall does the one thing he knows he’s not supposed to, and takes Harry’s twenty to the waitress to make change. He asks for just a dollar in quarters back. She thanks him like he had anything to do with it, and then Niall slips to the back of the diner on the balls of his feet like he’s moving in secret. He feeds the dollar into the ancient payphone in the back and rings Bressie’s number, the one he repeated to himself over and over again on the ride back from dropping Theo off.

The phone rings, and rings, and rings. Niall bites his cuticles. Nobody picks up.

Niall’s not alarmed. People with ordinary lives are usually asleep at three o’clock in the morning. He pulls his hood up over his head and listens to the bell above the door tinkle behind him, and then he walks far enough out into the night that nobody sees him shift into the wolf.

When he makes it back up to his room, Zayn’s still fast asleep where Niall left him, like nothing’s happened at all. Niall shucks his damp hoodie and jeans and climbs in beside him. He’s asleep in minutes.

***

Niall stifles a yawn behind his hand. Zayn’s head is cocked and the corner of his mouth is drawn up in an exasperated smile while the gentlemanly-looking faery explains why this _particular_ pine tree is absolutely critical to him. The younger faery has her arms crossed over her chest and keeps rolling her eyes. You’d know a faery if you saw one, and you’d be able to spot them in a crowd of regular people if you’d seen one before. They’re not particularly tall, but otherwise their appearances range as widely as people do. The only real giveaway are the tiny nubs of wings left behind on their shoulder blades.

Fallen angels, Niall knows some people – old, foul vampires, and rundown wolves – call them. ‘Course if you go by the old stories, the devil just gave humans a choice, and they made it for themselves. Niall tastes the faint, lingering scent of candles burning on the altar and the pungent scent of wine from the holy communion. He was such a tiny thing then he could hardly see over the back of the pew in front of him.

It falls to Zayn to resolve little conflicts like this, since his pack is stretched so thin holding down outposts. Ant and Danny are down south in Eugene, and Gigi is up in Portland. Deo and Willie run the borders in between. The more Zayn does, the more he’ll be recognized as the alpha he is, but – but, Niall can’t help but think, it’s awfully time-demanding.

“We’re doing public stuff today,” Zayn said. “Tomorrow we’ll check the territory lines ourselves. See if there’s anyone we need to, er, talk to.”

Niall nodded. Zayn hates this kind of stuff almost as much as he loves being needed.

In the early days, Niall used to transform for most of days like these. The other pack members could send up red flags about, _Territory dispute here,_ or _Vampire there_ , and Niall would shift back to let Zayn know.

These days, if Zayn doesn’t have to actively speak to anyone, Niall does all the talking. He bumps his head against Niall’s leg on the walk to the bus station. They’re in the Wildlife Refuge just outside Salem. Niall likes all small towns in the sense that they’re not big cities, but he prefers his own small town best. He and Zayn have been crashing in their little rent house for two months now, which is a month longer than anywhere else for the past year. Niall would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little attached, although he knows better.

Niall reaches back to smooth his hand over the top of Zayn’s lupine skull like he’s pushing his fringe back for him. Sometimes they use a leash for stuff like this to make their lame “no, he’s not a wolf, he’s a Husky,” story go over better, but most days they don’t need to. They see a grubby kid with a big dog by the tail, and they think they know the story. People turn a blind eye to homeless kids.

“There’s a selkie with a fishing problem near the lake, and then we’re done for the day,” Niall tells Zayn. Zayn nods in confirmation, his tongue lolling out of his mouth while he pants like a normal dog, and Niall wants to laugh and roll his eyes and play fetch, all three.

It isn’t until the bus is more than halfway down Highway 22 to Mohegan that Zayn lifts his heavy head off Niall’s lap. Niall frowns and asks, “What is it, Z?” before he remembers himself. He clears his throat and glances around. Zayn’s nostrils are wide and his pupils have shrunk to the size of pinheads, so Niall doesn’t hesitate. He yanks down on the cord running round the inside of the bus and the bell dings, and Niall and Zayn start pushing forward through the crowd of people squished onto benches and stood in the aisle. The driver takes one look at Niall’s huge, big-toothed dog and stops the bus. The doors squeal when he opens them, and Niall and Zayn are left on their own in the middle of nowhere, Oregon.

Niall’s shifting into a wolf the moment he reaches the undergrowth off the side of the highway. Growth from the Santiam State Forest grows west a lot further than its property lines, so it’s easy for Niall and Zayn to slip into the trees and get lost. Niall spares a moment of thought for those humans he’ll never see again, probably, and then puts it aside.

Zayn’s in his head the moment Niall’s settled into his new form. Zayn’s pitch black, a solid spot of darkness even in a starless night, but Niall’s all russet-brown. He doesn’t think in words so much as thoughts, or feelings, or something that crosses the synapses between their linked minds. _Smell that?_ Zayn seems to be saying, so Niall takes a deep breath.

Vampires. And a _lot_ of them. Niall doesn’t have the most refined nose, but he can detect threads of at least six or eight different bloodsuckers; one tastes like rust, the other ink, another one like old books. They’re not always bad news, but – they’re not just supposed to be hopping across pack boundary lines, either.

 _They weren’t here this morning,_ Zayn nudges, so Niall blinks, and understands. If they’ve only been on the move since the sun’s started setting, then that’s only been for thirty minutes, not even an hour. Moving with purpose, Niall realizes.

 _Louis?_ Niall asks, shoving the name toward Zayn. It smells like sandalwood and cinnamon, and if he could bite it, it’d feel like biting into an apple.

Zayn bares his teeth in a brief flash of light, and then he’s turning tail and disappearing into the trees. Niall lopes along after him. Adrenaline is already flooding through his system, but if they’re heading for a fight – and there’s really no question of _if_ – Niall is going to need as much energy from his system as he’s got. Suddenly he wishes he’d taken time to eat more than a package of peanut butter crackers he got out of the vending machine between bus stops, but it’s already too late for that.

Something strange happens to space when Niall sets the wolf loose. He can almost feel the space between steps contract in the moment so that he’s covering far more distance than he ought to be able to. Miles and just minutes later, their town slipping off the edges of most maps comes into view. Niall draws up beside Zayn, whose sensitive nose is tipped up into the breeze.

Zayn catches a thread of something, because he jets off down the rolling green hills, along the rusted railroad tracks, into the tiny town’s old industrial district. There’s two echoing warehouses stationed on the edge of town with short spans of railroad tracks linking them together, and a couple of back roads connecting them to the rest of the town.

The WinCo Foods and single, dilapidated movie theatre are on the other side of town, nearer the bus station, so this area doesn’t get much foot traffic. Niall only remembers having done a couple of loops through this part of town when he and Zayn first moved in and wanted the town to reek of them, to be inextricably theirs. Niall doesn’t know if it’s memory or actual sense, but he can smell Zayn’s ebullient mood on the wind, his own drawling howl that first night.

Niall doesn’t know what he expected to see when he and Zayn pulled up to the rotting warehouses, but it certainly wasn’t some fifteen or so vampires to be clawing and biting at each other. He can feel Zayn’s moment of hesitation – _one heartbeat, two_ – and then Zayn throws his shaggy head back and lets out a shrill howl that raises every hair on Niall’s ruff.

 _Obey,_ Zayn’s put into the howl, and _Stop,_ and half a dozen other things Niall doesn’t have the words for. The alpha’s here, Zayn’s said.

But nobody really thinks of Zayn as an alpha. Not yet, anyway. So what happens is, two, then three vampires break out of the tussle and move for Zayn and Niall.

Vampires don’t run like people. They don’t really run like anything, which is what makes their movements so eerie, so unsettling. First time Niall saw one run toward him, its eyes glowing red, fangs bared, shoulders bizarrely buffed out and half-bent over like it meant to catch the wind and fly, he’d almost thrown up. It’s like if a human could scuttle like a spider, limbs moving ways they’re definitely not supposed to.

Zayn breaks right, Niall breaks left, and the vampires follow. He’s dimly aware of Zayn inside his head, and the rest of the pack, too, but they’ve all got their own fights. Niall narrows his focus down to the broken slabs of concrete under his rough paws and the _thump thump_ of the vampire’s feet behind him. No heartbeat, of course.

He darts into the warehouse on the right through an open window. He comes down with a metal clang on a worktop no one bothered to resell when this place went out of business. He leaps off the dusty work surface like a swimmer pushing off the pool wall and jets down the narrow pathways between conveyor belts.

 _Fuck._ If he’d known they hadn’t gutted this place when they went out of business, he wouldn’t have run straight into a trap. He can just about feel the narrow walls of the conveyor belts closing in on him. If he runs over the top, he’s exposed, and if he stays low, it’s just a matter of time till the vampires think to cut him off. _Shit._

He can smell the blood on their breaths and in their veins and he knows it’s not theirs. The first vampire case Niall ever had, he followed their scent to an alleyway in downtown Portland where they were drinking from a girl who should’ve been at soccer or practice or home arguing with her brother. Niall only barely remembers the way his heart felt like it’d been doused in gasoline, and how he flung himself at the nearest one. He got flung into a wall and cracked a vertebra for his efforts, and it took him a month to heal. But he left pieces of the bloodsuckers scattered all over the Columbia River.

He staves off the berserker rage and forces himself to concentrate. He can’t afford to be crippled now, not with Zayn taking up such a huge part of his head. What can he do?

Let them catch him, maybe. He deliberately slows down and makes his chest heave, his breaths ear-scrapingly loud, and waits for the vampires to close in. One lands with a sharp metal _clang_ on the rusted metal belt right in front of him, and the other pulls up behind. So predictable.

 _There we are,_ Niall thinks, in a voice that scares himself, it’s so cold. The vampires’ teeth grow longer in a fight, their fingernails sharpening to diamond-hard points, and Niall only feels bad for the humans they used to be. Then he lunges at the one in front of him. He aims high and hard, and they go down in a tumble. The vampire works a hand up between them and rakes his nails down Niall’s soft underbelly. Pain blooms behind his eyes likes flowers of color, but Niall holds on grimly to keeping the wolf focused, not letting his human form come bubbling up too soon or losing himself to the animal altogether.

 _Balance,_ that’s what Zayn said it was all about.

Well, now’s the time to be good at it. Niall grits his teeth through the pain, and when he and the vampire hit the ground, he’s ready to roll away. He rolls smoothly to his feet and pounces on the vampire. He tears through the vampire’s throat in one swift motion.

He has time to think, _One down,_ before the other one lands neatly beside him and kicks him in the ribs so hard he hears them _crack_ with a sound like paper tearing. When the urge to let go of the wolf form hits him, Niall lets it happen. He’s a bludgeoned mess wet with not only his own blood, and the mental effort of maintaining balance has left him worn thin, like a t-shirt washed one too many times. It’s not a struggle to lie still on the floor with his eyes slitted, like his consciousness is bleeding out of him.

Thing about a human form, Niall knows – a vampire doesn’t much care if you spend the rest of your time a wolf. Human blood is human blood. He listens to his heart pound in his chest while the vampire soundlessly approaches. His heart doesn’t circulate blood, his organs aren’t functioning, there’s not even the raspy sound of breath drawn into his lungs. A dead thing, Niall knows.

It bends its cold head down over Niall’s throat and opens its mouth, fangs wide and dripping with vampire venom, and Niall sneaks a switchblade through its ribs and into its heart. He has just enough strength left in his arms to keep the vampire from collapsing on him, and then he sits up. The cuts on his chest aren’t that bad, really, and his ribs are fractured, but not broken.

Niall listens to his still very alive heart throb in his chest and surveys the damage. Two dead vampires, their bodies drenched in other peoples’ blood. Even as he watches, the blood begins to evaporate. When the sun rises and sunlight breaks through the windows, nothing will be left of their bodies at all but ashes. Niall swallows down the sick feeling in his stomach and coaxes the wolf out. Fur and teeth and claws settle over his skin like a warm blanket.

He reaches out to Zayn and finds him on the far side of the other warehouse, bloody and battleworn but not without a chance, so Niall spares himself a moment and tilts his head, listening hard. He can hear the eerie whistling sound of vampire claws cutting through the air in the annex as one fights another, and the _tap tap tap_ of their feet on gravel, on the tin roof overhead, and realizes _this is wrong._

Vampires aren’t like wolves, they’re not territorial. So for so many to be fighting so many other, they must – Niall pushes the realization toward Zayn as fast as he can, with a taste like burning rubber and smoke on the air. _An attack,_ he tries to convey to Zayn.

Vampires aren’t like wolves, so someone must’ve sent this lot after each other.

Zayn sends back the smell of a puddle of water left untouched for too long. _Our friend,_ he says. He means whoever’s pushing on the edges of their territory, setting them against Louis. Niall agrees.

He lopes through the warehouse at a steady pace, not moving too fast to watch himself, toward Zayn. Wolves are pack hunters and werewolf are pack fighters; their odds always go way up together. Niall’s halfway across the narrow clearing between the two warehouses when an upper window shatters and a teeming knot of vampires like a ball of worms spills out. They land on the gravel with a crunch but don’t stop fighting. Niall draws up short, his breath catching in his chest. The cuts on his belly sting.

One of the vampires claws its way out of the fray, and another vampire jabs its sharp-fingered hand through its ribcage and ribs out its heart, easy as that. It looks up with the red-rotten heart still in its hand and catches sight of Niall.

If he wasn’t afraid before, he is now.

The vampire claws its way across the ground like it’s broken its leg. The movement draws the attention of the other vampires, who stop picking the vampire apart and turn their attention on Niall. He can’t differentiate them, Niall realizes, one vampire – pack isn’t the right word, team seems too innocuous – colony from the other. Maybe they don’t even know themselves.

Before Niall’s forced to choose between throwing himself into the fight or making a mad dash for it, another wolf lets out an ear-piercing howl. The noise spirals up into the night and cuts the sky like glass, splintering apart at the top like a bolt of lightning. Niall’s never heard it before, but he doesn’t think he could mistake Harry’s howl for anyone else.

A whole new wave of adrenaline crashes over him. Harry, Louis’s Harry, the Harry Niall’s dreamt of killing him, the Harry Niall kissed, here. Niall’s stomach twists with anxiety. The pads of Harry’s paws thump regularly against the dense wood underbrush and then, seconds later, he bursts out of the trees. Compared to Niall, he looks well-fed and healthy and lustrous. Niall just sets his teeth. He’s always had to work harder to get what he wants; he can do that much.

Niall tries the tenuous mental connection that’s only really ever worked with his own pack members. _Zayn,_ he tries to send to Harry. His connection to Zayn feels like fingertips on the back of his hand, the weight of Zayn’s head on his shoulder. Niall’s not even sure what he’s looking for right now. Either way, he digs his toes in and listens to the uncanny scrape of his claws over cement. He runs as fast as he can, feeling the earth contract beneath his feet.

Niall knows he’s fucked up a split second before Zayn throws the warning into his mind like a tomato splatting against a wall. _No!_ Zayn’s sent, but he’s on the one side of the vampire horde, and Niall’s on the other. Niall thinks, _If we move together,_ but there’s so many of them.

The ones Niall left between warehouses have followed him down this narrow alleyway and there’s no way out that he can see, not even with Harry’s help, Harry a heavy, living weight at his side. Niall’s frayed nerves feel stretched beyond comprehension. Zayn in danger, Niall in danger himself, now Harry – Harry who has no idea how Niall feels, who can never know – thrown into the middle of it, where he might well be hurt, or worse. Niall gathers himself up, holds his soft parts close, flanked on either side by claws and teeth.

And then, to Niall’s everlasting surprise, Harry shifts back into human. “Nick!” he says, and one of the vampires actually stutters, its lips falling down over its teeth. “Nick,” Harry repeats. His voice sounds so warm, friendly, even. Like he knows this vampire. “Help us,” is all Harry says, and then he’s on four feet next to Niall again.

Zayn reads the fight plan like the strategist he is. _That one,_ he sends to Niall, so Niall pounces on the vampire nearest him. Its arm is attached to its shoulder with the tendrils of bone and sinew; it’s an easy matter to shred it the rest of the way off, knock the vampire off its feet, rip its throat out.

 _God,_ Niall thinks, and wants to throw up.

 _Not yet,_ Zayn sends, with a feeling like his palm up. It could mean _hold on,_ Niall’s not sure.

He starts to lose track of things. His body stays in the fight while his mind wanders, finds itself a nice quiet corner of Niall’s brain to hang out in until this is over. Niall is pushed to the back of his own mind, and the wolf takes the driver’s seat.

Dimly, Niall’s aware that of himself and Zayn and Harry working their way through the vampire colony until it’s the three of them, shoulder to shoulder, but – but it’s not just the three of them at all. Niall almost doesn’t believe his eyes under the gauzy light of a waxing moon, but he could swear the vampire Harry spoke to is picking apart the vampire Zayn was targeting.

Niall doesn’t have enough brain power to think about what he’s doing. He just goes for the next standing vampire. He sucks in a rattling breath and hurtles himself toward the undead. If this fight doesn’t end soon, he’s going to pass out or get stuck down here in the deep black well of being an animal. Maybe it’s already too late.

Niall’s tackled from the side and goes rolling over lush grass. He staggers up to his feet with his teeth bared, a deep growl rattling around his empty ribcage. _I’m making that sound,_ Niall thinks, and shivers. Harry growls right back into his face. Something sonorous and echoing threads itself through Harry’s voice. Persuasion. The tendrils of an alpha’s power.

Not Niall’s alpha, though. He lunges for Harry’s throat.

 _Wait,_ Niall thinks, too late. He didn’t mean to do that.

“Niall!” Zayn cries. A cry for help. Niall can smell the vampires ‘round him, six different potent combinations of blood that doesn’t belong to them, venom slicking their teeth. They smell like rotten eggs. Niall tries to answer the summons but Harry puts his jaws to Niall neck and squeezes.

 _Harry’s gonna kill him,_ Niall thinks in a panic. Harry’s going to let them kill Zayn. Fear wrenches the werewolf out of his hold and Niall shifts twitchingly, in phases. At the very least, Niall gets to die human.

Harry whines low in his throat. “I’m trying to help you,” he says, human again. “That one, those two, that one,” he points out vampires to Niall. “Not those.” Niall’s not sure how he tells the vampires apart. He’s not even sure why Harry’s pointing them out. “Don’t kill the rest.”

“I can’t,” Niall starts, doesn’t know where to go from there. Kill? Obviously he can. Do it without becoming a worse monster?

Maybe not.

“Yes, you can,” Harry says, gently but firmly. He’s back on four paws in a breath, his cold nose nudging up against Niall’s shin. Niall tries to find the wolf, loosely leashed and angry, hurt. _That’s me,_ Niall thinks. He takes hold of the leash.

Niall sends Harry’s target list to Zayn, who yips, obviously pissed, and then sets in. Harry’s vampires turn their attention away from the wolves and toward each other, instead, till it’s half a dozen ragtag vampires with puncture wounds so deep that they’d be fatal on humans – and wolves. By the time the last cold body is heaped up and left to turn to ash, Niall can’t make sense of Zayn’s buzzing thoughts. He slips out of wolf form and very nearly falls onto his knees, he’s so tired. His control of his own body feels tentative, fragile.

Zayn nudges the back of Niall’s leg with his big head, just like he’d done this afternoon. _Alright?_ He seems to be asking.

Niall touches the top of his head. Harry and his – Niall can’t believe he’s seeing this – his vampire friends wrap up their quiet, intense discussion, and Harry turns his attention to Niall and Zayn. He wonders what a sight they are. A skinny kid who never graduated high school and a pitch black wolf still slick with vampire blood. Niall’s never felt quite so alien in his life.

Harry folds his hands behind his back and approaches carefully. “Those were,” Harry starts, stops. “The one. My friend, Nick.”

“You broke the boundary line,” Zayn says, accusing, suddenly human. Now that Niall’s not a werewolf, the rest of the night trickles in slowly. Cicadas chirp in the trees, and the same faint breeze blows down from the north. The air smells sticky and rotten with vampire corpses, and Harry. Harry smells like sandalwood and vanilla and peach crème pie.

Harry’s pale green eyes land on Niall, like it’s Niall’s opinion he wants, Niall’s thoughts. Suddenly Niall remembers they’re meant to be – something. Something they shouldn’t, because it’ll only end in catastrophe. Though that’s what the witches want. Niall’s head hurts. “He saved our lives, c’mon, Zaynie.”

Zayn narrows his eyes. Every line of him looks carved out of night, a perfect statue of regal anger. “Is that why?” Zayn asks. 

Harry swallows and ducks his head so a tuft of hair falls over his forehead. He shoots a desperate look at Niall, like, _What do I say?_ and offers, “I came across their trail, followed the scent. Didn’t realize it was Nick till you’d already jumped in. You’d’ve killed each other.”

“Fucking insane,” Niall says. He feels strung out on adrenaline and stress and fear, and his mind keeps spiraling off onto what could’ve happened if they hadn’t all been so lucky to make it out alive. The cuts on his stomach itch and sting as they heal, and Niall is light-headed with hunger.

He could’ve lost Zayn. He could’ve let the wolf take over. He could’ve died himself, and where would that leave Theo? “Idiot,” Niall repeats, and stumbles forward. Harry pulls him into a hug like he’d been waiting for it. His pointy chin digs into the top of Niall’s shoulder and his hipbones press sharply against Niall’s, and for all that, Niall just curls his fingers into Harry’s shirt and holds on tight.

Harry pats his back clumsily, almost awkwardly, so Niall collects himself and pulls away. It’s a bit embarrassing, is all – getting emotional like he’s some kind of pup. Harry looks more understanding than he expects.

“The vampires,” Zayn asks. He has his hands curled into fists in his pockets like otherwise he’d be fidgeting, and Niall feels a surge of protectiveness for him. “Where are they?”

“Sent them to Louis’s side of the river,” Harry says. “Our side, I mean. I don’t know what he’s doing here, but the minute I know…”

Zayn nods sharply. He looks at Harry consideringly. “You can come back to ours. Like, if you want.” He licks his lips. “Reckon if you wanted us dead, you’d’ve let it happen.”

Niall doesn’t realize that he’s staring at Zayn in wide-eyed surprise till Harry clears his throat and says, soft, “Yeah, that’d be – that’d be nice.”

Harry has his battered Ford. He climbs into the front seat and turns the engine over, and Zayn gestures for Niall to climb in first, so Niall does. He clambers over the seat and settles in the narrow backseat, his knees almost drawn up to his chest, and rests his head against the window. Zayn closes the door behind him.

Niall can see his battered reflection on the window pane while their tiny little town rolls by outside. The glass is thick and warped, so Niall can’t tell how much of his face is actually bruised and swollen and how much just looks that way. Towering pine trees and clouds like skyscrapers block out the stars, and houses and barns cut their shapes out of the fog like photographs in a collage.

Niall can see Harry’s hands on the steering wheel, as well, the long lines of his arms tense but not nervous. Zayn sniffs the air delicately, and Niall wonders if he can still smell Niall in this car the other day – just a couple of days ago, though it feels so much longer. Niall swallows and tries not to wish for things to be different, for a million things. He can feel Zayn’s eyes in the rearview mirror boring into his face, assessing, and Niall just tips his head back against the seat and closes his eyes.

He drifts to sleep. The truck rumbles beneath him. He’s faintly aware of the droning hum of the truck’s air conditioning system, and the strange combination of Harry’s sweet smell and Zayn’s peppery flavor.

The truck pulls to a shrill stop, and the motor cuts out. The passenger side door opens. Niall blinks slowly, more asleep than not. “We’re home, bro,” Zayn says. “C’mon and eat.”

Niall fumbles his way out of the truck and blindly follows Zayn up the walk. It isn’t till Harry puts his hand out to steady him that Niall realizes he’s still there. A hot wave of self-consciousness rolls over him.

The house isn’t pretty at the best of times, but in the oxidized silver light of a half moon, it looks starving and malnourished. The clapboard siding looks like the slats of ribs and even the tree looks tired.

Zayn twists the knob because they don’t bother locking it and leads the way inside. Niall feels achingly self-conscious of Zayn’s laundry strewn across the floor, and the heap of paper plates and frozen dinners on the coffee table in front of the thirty-dollar Goodwill sofa he hadn’t gotten around to picking up yet. The carpet on the stairs is grimy with age and no matter how hard Niall scrubs, he can’t quite eradicate all the mold growing round the sink fittings.

“‘S not much,” Zayn says, like it’s a challenge, “but it’s home.” The _for now_ goes unspoken.

“It’s not bad,” Harry says, and if Niall was feeling more like himself he’d laugh. “You look like you’re going to pass out,” Harry says, observing him. “Do you have anything to eat?”

Zayn kicks open the creaky back screen door and pulls over a plastic chair from the table. He sits in the open doorway to let the sound of rain and cicadas fill the silence and lights a cigarette. “I dunno, do we, Niall?” Zayn asks. It’s hard to tell if his eyes ever leave Harry, who dithers in the middle of the room till he makes his mind up and sits down at the table.

Niall checks the freezer compartment of their fridge. It’s the only part of the icebox that works. There’s a block of cheese, tortillas, some leftover chicken, and a can of peanuts.

“Quesadillas,” Niall answers. “And, er, quesadillas.”

Nobody objects, so Niall busies himself getting the frying pan from the broken dishwasher where he left it to dry. He sets the pan on the stovetop. It’s only then that he notices that his hands are stained the color of rust up to his wrists. He’s splattered with it. Vampire blood, the blood of other people. His stomach tries to climb up out of his mouth. Niall swallows it down and washes his hands in the sink till his skin goes from red-stained to white to red and sore again. Then he turns the heat on and clears his throat, grateful for something methodical to do.

“Used to cook for me and my brother all the time,” Niall volunteers, for no particular reason. He can hear his own blood soughing in his veins and he wants so badly just to lie down and go to sleep. Harry just breathes. Zayn takes another puff off his cig.

“You have a brother?” Harry finally asks, curiosity winning out. Or maybe it’s just what he feels he ought to do. Ask. Pretend to care.

“Used to,” Niall says, and leaves it at that.  

Niall listens to the cicadas chirp and the steady drizzle of rain drip-dripping against the metal roof and breathes in the smell of butter and cheese and chicken sizzling on the stove. He did used to cook for himself and Greg. And then himself and Theo, when Greg was gone but for a handful of twenties dropped through the slat every few days.

Niall plates the steaming quesadillas on paper towels because that’s all they’ve got and eats standing up over the sink to catch his crumbs. “I’m going to bed,” he says, soon as he’s done.

“Night,” Zayn says, nodding his head at Niall, then Harry, who’s rising too. Harry follows him wordlessly up the stairs to Niall’s room because that’s what a mate would do, isn’t it, Niall’s cheeks flaming.

Niall turns in the middle of his messy bedroom and watches Harry lean back against the door. “Look,” he starts, but Harry shakes his head, holds his finger up to his lips. He mimes writing so Niall digs a pen and a piece of paper out of the backpack he carried across Oregon just a couple of months ago.

 _I can help,_ Harry writes, in an untidy scrawl. _I need your help, too._

It’s what he’s been saying from the start, Niall realizes, but maybe he actually means it. Maybe it can be as simple as that.

Niall sighs, and nods, and Harry writes quickly, _Kiss on it?_

It makes Niall scoff and his cheeks redden. He shakes his head. He's had about enough for one day, he's going to sleep before anything else can happen. Niall peels his blood-stained and sticky shirt off over his head and flops down on the bed before he can give himself time to consider what Harry thinks. He’s asleep before the bed has stopped creaking beside him, Harry’s weight settling in.

***

Niall dreams, as he often does, of Greg. In the dreams Greg is a wolf. Sometimes he’s running just out of Niall’s reach, try as he might to catch up, and sometimes he’s nipping at Niall’s tail, closing in on him no matter how hard he tries to pull away.

 _What do you want?_ Niall asks, trying to push the message across to Greg.

 _You,_ is always the answer. Niall knows the dream so well now he’s almost impatient for it just to happen and be over. Greg either leaves him behind or catches him. They’re both awful in distinct ways. Greg leaves Niall behind in dense Pacific Northwest woods and an unearthly darkness closes in on Niall, and he’s left entirely alone. Or Niall runs himself exhausted, and Greg catches up. His teeth bite into Niall’s flank first, or his throat, or sometimes his hind leg. He always go down sprawling and Greg’s on him in a flesh, tearing him apart, piece by piece. Niall can’t count the number of times he’s woken up screaming.

But this time it’s different.

The wolf answers, _Look,_ and Niall stumbles over his own feet. Greg is on him in an instant, tearing him apart piecemeal.

Niall starfishes across the mattress, lurching into consciousness. He wakes up next to a wolf and a shrill little scream bubbles past his lips. Niall scrambles off the mattress and backs up to the wall. The wolf shakes awake and growls before its eyes lock with Niall’s, and the growl peters out.

Wait a second. Niall recognizes those green eyes. “Harry?” he asks.

The wolf’s fur shimmers, and then Harry’s there, his expression caught somewhere between shock and laughter. “What the hell?” he asks.

“Had a dream,” Niall says defensively. His words register with himself. “I had a dream,” he says. “Where’s the pencil…” He finds his and Harry’s little notepad from last night and jots down as much as he can remember from the flash of imagery he had before the wolf ate him. A densely packed forest, every shade of green and brown, a spread of Redwoods like soldiers in formation, and a mangled body on the ground. Niall adds a handful of random details: the way the body is left spread-eagle, the moss-covered sign beside the trail.

“You ever seen anything like this?” Niall hands him the notepad. Harry sinks down to the mattress on his knees, his brow furrowing.

He rubs his chin. “You sure about the Redwoods?” Niall nods. “I think the only place you can find those is south a ways. Loeb State Park has some. Beyond that, we’d have to go down to California – what?”

“What was the name of that park? Loeb?”

Harry nods.

“That’s the southern border of Zayn’s territory,” Niall says. “We gotta talk to Zayn.”

Zayn’s sat in the plastic chair outside the screen door like he never went to bed. Maybe he didn’t. “Morn,” he greets them, his eyes flicking over Niall’s bare – but healed – chest before they settle on Niall’s face. He sits forward in his chair. “What?”

“Had a dream about a dead body,” Niall answers, then backs up and explains proper.

Zayn’s face twists around. Harry is a silent, warm presence by Niall’s side, and he thinks for the first time how easy it’d have been for Harry to kill him in the night. Jesus. What the fuck. Why does he have to think of this stuff at the worst times? “No offense, Nialler, but you’re having visions, now, or what?”

“No,” Niall says, and bites his lips. How can he explain to Niall that it felt just like the witches’ vision without explaining that he’d been to see the coven without Zayn? It’s not like he’s not allowed his secrets, but he doesn’t like the idea of Zayn thinking Niall’s betraying him, either.

Luckily, Harry says, “He went pretty deep into the transformation last night. Maybe he saw something.”

Niall gives him a curious look over his shoulder. Did Harry pull that out of nowhere, or is there a grain of truth in what he said?

Zayn doesn’t look like he knows what to think either. “Me and Niall can check it out,” he says. “After we find out about your vampire friend.”

Harry bites his lip. “I should go with him,” he argues, as gently as he can. “You have territory to defend.”

“Yeah? What’ll your alpha think about that?”

Harry hesitates a beat too long, and Zayn’s eyes light up dangerously. “He doesn’t know, does he?” Zayn asks, marveling at it. “About you two. No wonder you were so ready to come over here last night – how could you go home reeking of another pack? What’s he going to think when you roll up to your den smelling like his bed?”

They did absolutely nothing last night but just the way Zayn’s phrased it has Niall hot under the collar.

Harry opens his mouth to answer, but no words come out. Finally he admits, “I guess you could say I’m running away from home.”

“Christ,” Zayn murmurs.

Niall trots back upstairs for the map he carried across Oregon till he and Zayn landed in this little town. He spreads it out over the tiny kitchen table downstairs. The map hangs over the sides like a cheap tablecloth. “Here’s Mohegan,” he says, pointing to the spot. “Where’s the place, Harry? The park?”

Harry runs his eyes over the map. “Here, see?” he asks. “That’s, what, three hundred miles?” He meets Niall’s eyes over the map. “That’s an easy day trip.”

Zayn shakes his head. “I’m saying no,” he declares, and folds his arms over his chest. Niall can understand why. But also, he’s not a baby. He can handle himself. If anything, it’s everyone else who should be worried. Niall’s the one who can’t control himself.

“I’ve never been psychic before and I don’t aim to be now, but we need answers, yeah? Let me and Harry go get them.”

Zayn drops his voice and leans forward in his seat like Harry can’t hear him. Maybe he’ll have the decency to pretend he can’t. “He just told us he’s running away,” he says.

And he thinks Niall could do the same. Niall could laugh. “Jesus, Zed.”

But Zayn’s eyes flicker between Niall and Harry, and Niall realizes he has a point. Niall stumbled into this situation backwards with one eye open, but maybe he should’ve thought it through better. Does he really think that cooperating is their best bet at avoiding mutually assured destruction? Yeah. Should he have talked it through with Zayn better, even if he couldn’t have told him the whole truth? Yeah.

“Harry,” Niall starts, but he just nods and says, “I’ll get the truck going.” Niall turns back to Zayn. “I wouldn’t, you know? You and me, we’re family. Always will be.”

“You don’t gotta explain,” Zayn shakes his head. “It’s not like I haven’t fucked my fair few on this trip, haven’t I? I just want to know you’re being careful. And you remember why we’re in this in the first place. You chose me, remember, Niall. For a reason.”

Niall, for the first time in a long time, wants to snap back at Zayn. Be mean, even. What’s the point?, he asks himself, and bites his tongue. “I remember,” is all he says.

Harry’s rubbing his thumbs against the wheel when Niall pulls open the door and drops into the passenger seat. “All good?” he asks quietly.

Niall shrugs, then sighs. He can see Zayn’s point of view, too. How neat it is for Harry to gain his trust and kill them both, stick the knife in where it hurts the most. Niall’s always going to have to try, though. He’s got to hold on to whatever humanity he has left. “Yeah,” he says. “Now let’s go find that dead body.”

***

Harry drives with the windows down and the radio turned up loud. He pops sunflower seeds into his mouth, shells them, and spits the shell halves out through the open window to be blown away. Niall divides his time between Harry’s mouth and the miles unfolding through the windshield.

Harry climbs back in behind the wheel after a quick pitstop to refill the tank and pee. Niall reaches out and turns the radio down while Harry pulls them out of the Quik-E-Mart parking lot.

“We should probably, like,” Niall says lamely. “Talk.”

“I think,” Harry says, gingerly inching the radio back up again, “not talking is working for us, yeah?”

And maybe it is. Niall thinks of the witches’ vision, and how he’d dreamt of sleeping in the backseat of his parents’ car secure in the knowledge that he was safe. Maybe this is a version of that. Niall slumps further in his seat and kicks his feet up on the dashboard, and the miles tick by.

They get to the park late in the afternoon. The sky always feels so much bigger and closer away from towns and cities. The trees vaunt it that much closer to the top of the world, Niall thinks, and it’s like they might as well be holding it up. He used to think he could climb to the top of a Redwood and touch the sky.

The trees grow so tall that not much light filters through the layers of brush. The soil is dark brown and wet-smelling, but just a few feet down it goes hard and infertile and dry. Fireflies flicker on and off like tiny neon signs as the trees give way to a dark forest.

“’In the middle of the journey of our life,’” Harry starts suddenly, “‘I found myself in a dark forest, where the straight way was lost.’”

“Dickens?” Niall guesses.

Harry shakes his head. “Dante.”

 It’s warmer even these few hours south, so Niall shucks his flannel shirt and leaves it in the truck. The parking lot is just a simple blacktop affair with a public bathroom and a handful of lights on telephone poles strung up with power lines. Harry’s wearing the same almost sheer black t-shirt and skinny jeans as last night like the temperature doesn’t bother him at all. Maybe that’s a perk of the werewolf package Niall hasn’t mastered yet.

“Where’s your border attendant?” Harry asks lightly.

“Dunno,” Niall answers. He and Harry follow the trail into the woods. He squints. “Well, truthfully, he’s a faery, so –”

Harry makes a choked noise. “You’ve a faery for a territory guard?”

“Yeah, and?” Deo asks. His face appears in bark on the tree next to Harry’s head. Harry looks round and practically leaps out of his skin, he’s so surprised. “Don’t think I can do my job, do ya? Why don’t you try getting past me, punk?”

“Deo,” Niall says patiently. “Hi.”

Deo brightens, if it’s possible to say that of a tree. His expression goes concentrated, and then his body melts out of the tree. Arms, legs, a neck, a head. He looks so human, but his skin is very pale green, threaded with violet veins. His irises are so pale Niall thinks he can see the trees and the underbrush in them.

“How is it, chief?” Deo asks. He opens his arms so Niall steps into his embrace. He smells like pine needles and sky, and not much else. He’s cool, too, but not like a vampire. Niall can feel the tendrils of vine circling Deo’s arm that curiously test the fabric of Niall’s shirt and prod his skin like he might be sunlight. “We missed you round here.”

“Missed you too,” Niall says, and means it. This was one of the earliest places Niall and Zayn managed to put together a boundary line. It feels a lot like a first victory. Niall’s pretty ferociously proud of it. He turns to Harry. “This is Harry, he’s…” Niall blanks out on what to say. “From another pack,” he manages. “But, er, my friend.”

Deo looks him up and down. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Well, anyway.”

“Right.” Niall clears his throat. “I’m – I – we’re looking for this spot,” Niall says. He takes his page of notes out of his pocket. “There’s redwoods around, and a hill, and you can just about see the sky. You wouldn’t happen to know – ?”

Deo’s been nodding since Niall started talking. “Yep, absolutely I do. Follow me, lads.”

A bit like a ghost – not that Niall believes in those, of course – Deo merely joins up with every tree in his path and rematerializes on the other side. Faeries aren’t as common as they say they used to be but Niall’s met his fair share. Deo’s one of the few combative enough to make a good border guard, but he’s not by any means the only great faery Niall knows.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Harry starts, “how’d you join up with this gang?” Harry tips his head toward Niall. Niall’s not sure how he manages such long strides in such tight jeans, but he seems perfectly at ease hiking around the forest with his curls bobbing in his face.

Deo lets out a cackle. Niall thinks he sees other faeries emerge from one tree just to slip into another, or maybe his eyes are simply playing tricks on him. In the distance, a wolf howls. The hairs on Niall’s arms go up, and he has to laugh at himself. “Picked them up off the side of the road, didn’t I?”

Niall rolls his eyes. “Our car ran out of gas,” he tells Harry. He leaves out the part that it was stolen, that Niall had just been shot a few times, that Zayn only had one good eye to see out of. “We pulled over and sneaked into the brush to sleep it off. Woke up to this one staring at us like something out of Pocahontas.”

Deo lets out another barking laugh. “He wasn’t near so cheeky then,” Deo says, and reaches out to pinch Niall’s ruddy cheek.

“Dick,” Niall says fondly.

“It’s called a pistil, Niall, don’t be specist,” Deo says.

The climb goes steep and almost treacherous, so they talk less, concentrate more. Niall’s consciousness limits itself to the _rasp, rasp_ of his own breathing, the next good handhold or foothold he can see, Deo and Harry on either side of him. It feels a bit like mopping can, or getting up to his elbows in dish soap. Niall’s mind clears and all that’s left is the task at hand.

 Another mental image whipcracks across his mind so fast that Niall gasps and pitches forward, scraping his cheek on a rough outcropping of rock. Just as in his dreams, the trees whip past Niall so fast that they’re nothing but a blur, and he can feel hot breath on his flank, closing in on him, preparing to sink its jaws in. “Run,” Niall just manages to get out. Pain explodes behind his eyes like his brain’s just been set on fire, and Niall retches helplessly into the grass, his stomach roiling. 

Harry yanks him up by the collar and sets him on his feet. “You, too,” Harry insists. “C’mon.”

Niall retches again, tears leaking out of the corner of his eyes. Harry doesn’t give him time to argue, just grabs his hand and starts pulling him along. Niall keeps his eyes closed, trusting Harry not to throw him off any cliffs, and tries to process what he’s seeing. A load of darkness, a bright green flash. Niall can’t make sense of it. What else? Smell. Taste. The air smells like rain and soil and the blood matted in his fur.

“Harry,” Niall tries. He can’t keep his feet under him. Niall can _feel_ it getting closer, though. “Deo,” Niall adds.

“Here, chief,” Deo says, his voice close. “I’m just going to look over the rise – I’ve got friends in the next copse over, maybe they can give us shelter…” His voice trails off. Niall clutches the pieces of his skull in his hands and rocks back and forth, trying not to whimper. Something feels _wrong._

“Niall,” Harry says. He must crouch in front of him because his voice is suddenly close. He speaks softly and clearly. Harry’s hands curl loosely around Niall’s wrists, trying to prize them away from his head. “Niall.”

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” Niall asks. This doesn’t feel like a wolf thing but it must be, right? What else can it be? “Fuck.”

Harry rubs little circles into Niall’s wrists with his thumbs. It doesn’t make the headache feel any better, but Niall it’s something to focus on, something Niall wants to feel. Harry’s pretty distracting that way. Niall carefully slits his eyes. They’re sequestered in a little cave made up of roots. It doesn’t offer much in the way of camouflage, but it’d be easy to defend. Or be trapped in. “I don’t know,” Harry admits, and his voice sounds as scared as Niall feels. “Unrelated, but the sunset is so beautiful. You’d think it’s fall, the way all the leaves are colored.”

“D’you know _ibi_ ‘s Latin for both when and where?” Niall asks. Every word makes his head feel like a gong that someone has just smashed with a hammer, his brain ringing with pain, but at least he can get the words out.

“I didn’t, actually,” Harry says.

Niall’s not a wolf, but he can still hear Harry’s heart pulsing blood. Deo’s harder to pick out but Niall can hear the whispering shuffle of his feet.

The pain in Niall’s head keeps building, the rhythmic thumping of paws on the forest floor so close now that Niall thinks he might be able to see the wolf in the brush if he could just stand to open his eyes. His brain feels like an egg that rolled off the counter, and Niall grits his teeth, thinks of Theo – and the pain vanishes. Niall frowns, sagging forward into Harry. “Something’s –” _wrong,_ he means to say, but his voice is eaten up by the sound of a gun firing.

The last thing Niall hears is Deo’s surprised cry of pain.

“No, no, no,” Niall murmurs. He staggers to his feet. Harry’s hands fall away from his wrists and Niall blinks over and over again. The pain inside his head has left his eyes blurry and damp. He can make out just enough to scramble over the top of the rise, and then he sees Deo’s supple, plantlike body splayed out on the ground just a few dozen yards away. The air smells burnt, singed with gunfire.

A sniper. A hunter.

The change rolls over Niall so fast that he isn’t even left time enough to feel it. He and Harry are shielded by a thin line of trees, just outside of which lies Deo’s body. Niall tips his nose up and sniffs the air. He smells saltpeter and fresh soil and pine needles, and over the top of that, sweat. Niall tilts his head. Soap and deodorant and the hurtful sharp smell of a freshly fired gun.

Niall takes off toward the hunter like a bullet from a gun.

Harry’s paws hit the soil in pursuit, his howl cutting over the rushing wind in Niall’s ear with a soft, _Careful, wait,_ that Niall ignores. Someone killed his friend. Niall’s going to rip his throat out.

He circles the edge of the greenbelt, a growl rumbling low in his chest like the thrum of some engine.

Niall’s only warning before the next shot comes is a sharp change in the hunter’s breathing, the bullet whistling through the air like a knife cutting through cheese. Niall’s moving so fast that it’s easy simply to dance out of its way. The earth contracts beneath his feet, makes every step feel miles long. Niall’s on top of the hunter before he even knows it.

He goes for the gun first. The hunter tries to aim it at him and Niall does what comes natural, closes his jaws down on the gun and _bites._ The reinforced steel warps just enough under his kamikaze attack that Niall feels confident the hunter won’t be able to use it again. He still rips it out of his hands for good measure.

Something smells… _off_ …about the hunter from this close up. Niall flicks the gun into the trees with a toss of his head and dances back, his ears pressed low to his head, his eyes narrowed.

The next attack comes with no warning at all. The hunter thumps himself in the chest. Niall worries for a moment about a bomb – Jesus – but nothing happens. A second ticks by, two, Niall crouches low to spring on the hunter for one final assault, and the smell knocks him sideways just as surely as a wave at high tide.

It smells like the laundry detergent his mom used to use, and a field of flowers baking under the hot sun, and bread fresh from the oven. Niall shakes his head, trying to clear it. It smells so _good_ he could just take a nap in that smell, flip over onto his back and roll around in it like he’s settling into bed for the night. His muscles loosen, and lethargy sets in. Distantly, Niall thinks he ought to get up, bite someone, he’s angry about something. Jesus, he’s so sleepy though. So tired.

His fur shifts, and Niall blinks groggily, his face pressed to supple green grass. _Get up,_ he tells himself, but he can’t do it. It’s like he’s had the world’s most effective massage, except he didn’t want this, he’s paralyzed inside his own body.

Harry howls, a light, drifting moan on the wind, and another gun goes off. Niall tastes gunpowder even with his insensitive human nose and finds the strength to lift his head, look round. _Not Harry, too._

“Niall?” the hunter asks. His tone is stunned, his voice distantly familiar.

Niall tries to say, “I’ll rip your lungs out of your goddamn throat.” What comes out is, “Hngh.”

The hunter pushes his black ski mask up. He has a square jaw bristling with five o’clock shadow, and a mouth that’s Niall more accustomed to see smiling than set into a hard, stern line.

It’s Liam.

***

Liam takes a step closer to Niall, his expression all blank wonder. Niall tries to work up a growl in his human chest, pushes himself up to hands and knees. His body feels like it weighs two tons, and his elbows buckle. Niall pants, staring at the grass under his hands. Christ. Fuck.

 _Harry,_ he thinks.

“Stay where you are,” Liam says. He sounds stern but not quite afraid. Not yet. His boots crush grass and twigs obnoxiously loud. Niall hears him make another surprised sound. “Jesus, who is – what is this?”

Niall’s head feels like someone scooped his brain out, threw it into a blender, and then poured it back into his skull. The muscles in his arms and legs feel drained, and his stomach keeps cramping with hunger. He can’t even pass out, he’s so hungry. Niall shakes his head and pushes himself up till he’s sitting back on his heels. He can make out Liam in the dimness stood over another body.

“What did you –” Niall starts. He stumbles to his feet and falls again. At the very least, he can’t even register the pain of landing on his knees anymore. Niall crawls, instead, to where Harry’s unconscious on the grass, blood leaking out of his shoulder at a steady and terrifying rate. “He’s not healing,” Niall thinks out loud. “Why’s he not -” He cranes his head to look up at Liam. It’d take one quick bullet through his brain for Liam to kill him, and Niall can’t even be bothered right now. All he can think about is Harry’s hands on his wrists trying to keep him from ripping handfuls of his own hair out. “Silver bullets.”

Liam nods, pauses, then nods more definitively. “Yeah, of course, it’s SOP – standard operating procedure. Jesus, Niall, what are you doing out here? You’re a _shifter?_ What the fuck, but I’ve seen you eat Starburst. I’ve seen you on the full moon, I –”

“Shut up,” Niall says. He can’t stand any more of Liam’s helpless babbling. It’s bad enough when hunters mean to kill them. Somehow, it’s worse knowing that Liam doesn’t really understand what he’s done. What he’s doing.

Niall’s been shot with a silver bullet before, but Zayn dug it out for him. If Niall had thought of hunters, which fucking Christ he ought to have, he’d have come prepared. Instead, all he’s got on him is a – oh, that’s right. His pocket knife. His Swiss Army knife. Niall whips it out of his pocket and flips through the different attachments. What the fuck would work best? Christ, Niall’s gotta get that bullet out of him before he bleeds out. Pick one. Pick.

So Niall picks the narrow little blade, the one that’s probably for opening letters. He licks his lips, braces one hand on Harry’s chest, and digs the blade in. Harry surges up against the pain with a wordless screech, his body twisting to get away from Niall.

“Hold him down,” Niall tells Liam. Liam can’t stop staring at Harry, at Niall, at the disaster this night’s become. Niall remembers that feeling. He can sympathize. But now isn’t the time for him to talk Liam through this shit show. “Liam, get down here and _hold him still._ ”

Liam drops to his knees and puts one careful hand on Harry’s wrist, the other on his ankle. Niall’s afraid of doing more harm than good by digging around in an open wound. God only knows what veins are running through this area, Niall doesn’t know of many wolves that’ve undergone amputation and lived to tell about it.

“Harder,” he tells Liam, whose grip turns white-knuckled around Harry’s limbs. Niall digs the letter opener in till he hits something hard. Harry flinches in Liam’s grip. His face is already so pale that Niall averts his eyes. “Think I got it,” Niall says. He’s either found bullet or bone. Niall tries to get the edge of the letter opener under the bullet and scoop, inching it out one painful centimeter at a time.

Harry’s skin sizzles with contact as it comes up, and Niall breathes a tiny, stricken sigh of relief. The bullet emerges from Harry’s skin dented from the impact – it must’ve hit bone, then. Niall uses the edge of his t-shirt to pick it up and slide it into his pocket.

Liam’s still kneeling on Harry’s hand, his hands holding onto Harry’s leg. Niall licks his lips again and tastes blood. Harry’s skin gently steams; Niall can hear his heart rate pick up as his body goes into repair mode. Harry’s well-fed and in good shape, thank God – he’ll heal up fine.

Niall’s brain ticks over like a spluttering engine finally catching cylinders. “Deo,” he says, and scrambles up. “Liam,” Niall says, “for God’s sakes –”

“I’m not going to hurt him,’ Liam says. His face is contrite, rueful. Ashamed, even. “I swear, Niall, if I knew –”

But Niall’s already moving on. He feels for Liam and his guilt but right now, he’s got to see what he can do about what Liam’s done. Niall climbs the shallow hill like someone trying to climb the sheer face of a mountain, he’s so tired. He pulls himself over the top and drags his feet to where Deo is spread eagle on the ground.

His eyes are still open, but his breath has stopped. Niall sinks to his knees. The green drains out of his leaves, leaving them shades of pale yellow. Niall’s never seen a faery die before. Probably there’s something poetic and lovely about his body simply returning to earth and soil. Right now, all Niall can think about is Deo finding him and Zayn on the side of the road. Saving their lives. And Niall got him killed.

Niall reaches out, ignoring the way his hand trembles, and closes Deo’s eyes.

“Niall,” he hears. Harry fumblingly makes his way up the incline, his arm cradled close to his chest. Liam follows close behind, his face ashen. “Sorry, but if he was your border attendant…”

A wave of exhaustion rolls over Niall so heavy that he thinks he could pass out right here in the grass next to Deo’s body and sleep for an age. Darkness in the forest at night has a material feel to it, like gauze layered so deep that no light seeps through.

Niall levels a look at Liam. “Is that what you meant to do?”

Liam shakes his head. “I didn’t know, I swear. I didn’t know you were – I didn’t know you could – that you were,” Liam stops, lamely. “That you weren’t a monster.”

He came here for a reason, though. Why? Niall shakes his head. He’ll get that question answered when they’re back on neutral ground, or Zayn’s territory – somewhere he can stop and catch his breath. “We’ve got to get back to the truck,” he tells Harry, who nods. “You’re coming with us.”

Liam pales. “I –”

He could threaten him. Rip his esophagus out, chew through his legs. Something awful. Instead, Niall says, “C’mon, Liam. Please, man.”

So Liam nods.

The trek back through the woods takes longer than Niall remembers. He knows they’re making too much sound, but he doesn’t dare shift back into wolf form with Liam a breath away from screaming, Harry’s face a rictus mask of pain. Niall needs to get them back on the road and then he can think again. And then do the next thing. One step at a time.

One moment, the forest is still except for owls _Who? Who?_ in the trees and the distant thunder of tires spinning over the blacktop. The next, sounds explodes around them. Twigs snap, the trees moan, and birds’ wings beat against the night. Liam notices it first. “Boys,” he says.

“Shit,” says Harry, and picks up the rear.

Invaders. An outside pack come to claim the territory. Niall doesn’t want to think about what’ll happen to them if they’re caught on it.

“Hurry,” he says needlessly.

The buzzing halogen lights of the parking lot are visible through a break in the trees when the first wolf howl shatters the night. Niall drops a select few curse words and reaches back for Harry’s hand to pull him along faster. Harry’s hand closes around Niall, and an unfamiliar feeling sneaks through the slats between his ribs. It feels less alone.

“Why,” Liam starts. “If you’re –”

“Don’t ask, just shoot first,” Niall says.

Liam doesn’t look convinced. Harry meets Niall’s eye and Niall knows that if they make it out alive, it’ll be on them, not the confused hunter.

Harry’s the one who bites the bullet – figuratively speaking – and shifts first. His ears twitch and spin like satellites picking up signals and he yips, soft and sure and clear. Niall hasn’t a clue what he’s tried to tell the other wolves, and he doesn’t much care. As it stands, they’re sitting – running – ducks. His priority is getting the hell out.

Niall’s foot touches the parking lot blacktop and something slams into him from the side. He goes rolling, the lockbox where he stores the wolf thrown all about so that Niall can’t reach in and pull it out. A great big, burly brown wolf stares down at him, saliva dripping down its jowls. Niall’s brain stutters to a halt.

All this way. All the stuff Niall’s done to survive the past couple of years. And he’s going to be eaten by a wolf just a few yards short of the truck. The metal doors whine as they’re flung open and Harry and Liam climb inside. Niall feels a strange, brightly colored note of relief; at least they made it.

“Go on, then,” Niall tilts his chin up. He hopes he looks brave. He certainly doesn’t feel it. More like, if this is how he’s got to go, he wants it to be on his terms, right? He doesn’t want to be a quivering mess. He gets to choose that much, at least.

The wolf cocks its heavy head, and then it opens its maw, Niall braces himself, and…the beast backs away. Niall’s breath catches in his chest.

The truck screeches to a stop no more than two feet from Niall’s toes. “C’mon!” Liam says, so Niall bounds through the open door and lands across Harry’s and Liam’s laps. Liam slams the door shut and the rumbling old Ford peels out of the blacktop parking lot and back onto the highway with a shriek of burnt rubber.

Harry peers down at Niall in his lap. “Alright?” he asks conversationally.

Niall lets himself lay across Harry’s legs for a sweet ten seconds. Then he crawls out from under the steering wheel and over Liam to the door. He rolls down the window and takes a deep, gulping breath of the wind. Wolves. A whole lot of them.

“I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet, so to speak,” Niall says. “You got any more guns, Liam?”

Liam shakes his head. Except for looking very pale, he seems more like himself since he found Niall on the ground instead of a great wolf. “No,” he shakes his head. “No, just this –” he takes a little pistol out of his waistband “- not much use against a wolf. ‘S far as I know.”

“Got any more of whatever you used on me?” Niall asks. “What was that, anyway?”

“Wolfsbane,” Harry answers for him.

“But the stories –” Niall starts.

Harry explains, “Not all the legends are true. Why would we want them to be? Much better that no one knows the whole story.”

Niall puts his face back out the window instead of replying. Jesus. Every time he thinks he has a handle on things, the carpet gets pulled right out from under him. His head throbs, dully. Niall chews on the inside of his cheek. What’s going on with him? How’s he supposed to figure it out? Niall takes a deep breath of fresh air, and then he pulls himself back inside the truck.

Liam’s looking steadily back at him. “Zayn is, too, isn’t he?” Liam asks. It doesn’t really sound like a question.

“We’ve got to get back,” Niall tells Harry belatedly, looking past Liam. “The border – Zayn will know.”

“And Nick,” Harry says grimly, his hands knotted around the steering wheel. “I need to talk to him.”

They stop just once to refill the tank. Niall begs the bathroom key off the clerk and goes back outside to reach the toilet. His skin is pale, and his blond hair is lank and hanging in his eyes. He looks so much older than he ought to, and tired. Niall feels like he could gladly sleep for a couple of years, not that he has the option. He bares his teeth at himself. They’re all flat-bottomed. Niall tongues at his molars. He shakes his head at himself, washes his hands, and steps out of the bathroom.

Liam’s waiting for him outside. Niall wouldn’t have let him out of his sight, except where could Liam go? If he’d had a partner, a battle buddy, surely he would’ve taken them to the field with him. Niall has the particular sinking feeling that Liam is all on his own. It makes standing up to his big sad puppy dog eyes that much harder.

Warm summer air licks over Niall’s ankles and the back of his neck, and he can detect faint threads of Liam’s scent on the breeze. Deodorant and sweat and boy. Niall thinks of the hungry-looking kid in the mirror and holds them up against each other. They’re nothing at all alike, except they both used to be kids not long ago.

“I’m really – I’m so sorry about, about your friend, I wouldn’t have – I didn’t know you were still…you,” he says lamely.

Niall holds up his hand. “I know, Liam. Okay? Dude. Just…” He heaves a breath. “Save it till we get home, okay?” Save it for Zayn, he means. Liam nods like he understands.

He hesitates, then, “There’s something happening, isn’t there?”

Niall thinks of the past two years. The past two _days._ “It’s all happening,” he tells Liam, cracking a smile.

 Harry climbs into the track bearing two bulging plastic bags full of gas station food. “Nutritious,” Niall says, and tears into a Slim Jim like a hungry wolf.

“Well, it’s no quesadillas,” Harry laughs. He sends Niall a soft smile, tired at the edges.  

Niall watches him expertly navigate the gear shift. He tips his head back against the seat and fills the yawning pit of his stomach, and then he closes his eyes. Something tells him he’s going to need the rest.

The smell of home wakes Niall from his dreams. The McDonald’s down the road from the coven’s Goodwill always smells like burnt fries, and the defunct gold mine just outside of town smells like cool, undisturbed earth, like places the planet’s slept for a long, long time. “Okay?” Niall asks, almost nonsensically.

Harry blinks, then looks over at him. He has one hand on the wheel and the other arm stretched across the back of the seat. He presses his fingertips against Niall’s shoulder while Liam snores between them. “Okay?” Harry parrots back.

Niall rubs the sleep out of his eyes. He feels a little silly, all of a sudden, for Harry doing all the hard work while Niall curled up on the forest floor in pain and napped in his truck. He’s not really doing much, is he?

“I think I’ll drop you off at yours,” Harry says. “We can regroup and, like, compare notes later. Yeah?”

Niall nods. It makes the most sense. Especially since Niall will be bringing in Liam, who killed Zayn’s border guard. Who killed Deo. Who Zayn’s been making disgusting heart eyes at since they rolled into this town two months ago.

“You ever think, like, I could be studying for midterms or something right now? Like, if we were normal?” Niall asks.

Harry thinks about it. “I don’t know. Not really, no. Don’t reckon I’d be all that well-suited for it.” He flashes a grin at Niall. His teeth are bright and white in the moonlight shining through the windshield. His curls brush the tops of his cheeks and the smooth, tan line of his throat, and his eyes crinkle up at the corners when he smiles. He’s beautiful. Niall can admit that to himself. “You?”

Niall shakes his head. “Never.”

Zayn’s and Niall’s rundown house is exactly as Niall left it. He can’t smell anything but pine trees and wood burning in the little downstairs furnace. He wants to see Zayn again, and slough some of the burden of this responsibility onto his shoulders, so bad that he aches with it. Mostly he just misses him.

Niall slides out of the truck first, then Liam. Niall pauses at the open door to tell Harry…something. Thank you? Sorry?

“I’ll be by as soon as I can,” Harry says again. “Don’t suppose I can call you?”

Niall snorts. How would Zayn pay the bill? “Just throw some more rocks at my window.” He gives himself a moment to look at Harry, who pinches his bottom lip. If they were normal, would Niall ever have had a chance to meet him? “Hey,” Niall says. Harry’s eyes focus on him. “It wasn’t such a bad idea, us working together.”

“No,” Harry says, looking pleased. “I don’t think so, either.”

Niall closes the truck door and Harry reverses out of the drive. Zayn’s in the doorway to their house when he turns back, his brow furrowed. Niall starts up the walk, Liam dragging at his side. 

*** 

Zayn finds Niall stretched out on the roof that night. He settles in next to him on the hard, gritty shingles and lets out a breath like he’d been holding it all day.

He’d sat through Niall’s summary of the day without saying much. He just nodded at him to go on when Niall paused, trying to sort out the bright hard impressions the wolf left on his mind and the logic of what had happened, the sequence of events. He was even less responsive to Liam, who explained that the hunters he knew sent him to the area to address the burgeoning werewolf problem.

“Max and Nathan,” Niall had murmured. The names of the last pack members that occupied this area before Zayn moved in and claimed it for himself, against Louis’s stake. Zayn and Louis each both killed the other remaining members, which complicated territory rights.

Zayn nodded stiffly. After he said his piece, Liam chewed over his plush bottom lip, the tips of his eyelashes quivering believably. “I wasn’t sure,” he told Zayn, “about you two. I wasn’t – it wouldn’t have, like, to talk to you, but plan –”

“Fine,” said Zayn. He’d stood up quickly, all wooden movements like he was some kind of twitchy marionette on old strings. “We’ll give you a head start of twenty-four hours to pack your shit and get out of town, and then we’re coming after you.”

“Zayn,” Liam had said, his voice hushed, pained.

Niall listened to Zayn stomp his way upstairs. The muted thunderous crash of the bureau hitting the ground came not long after. Liam, for some reason, didn’t really want to leave. He lingered in the doorway for a long moment, his hands curled into nervous fists at his sides.

Niall almost never thinks Zayn looks young, because Zayn’s face would do well in an art museum, but he can’t help but think so while he looks at Liam. Liam looks like the sort of boy who would wash your sweatshirt after he borrowed it and help pick up after a party. Niall knew without Zayn speaking that he didn’t belong in their weird world.

“Have a nice life,” Niall had said, with a weak grin.

Liam didn’t say goodbye.

“How far do you think he’ll get?” Zayn asks.

Niall doesn’t bother asking who he means. “Depends,” Niall answers. “Did you see him off to the border?”

Zayn snorts. “No.”

Niall frowns. “Why not?”

Zayn lets out a long, slow sigh. “Do you ever think, like, if you’ve got one normal thing going for you, then you’re alright? Like, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a whole different world than everybody else.”

Niall purses his lips. Not really, no. He was a normal person, and this stuff poured over the edges of normality into his little life like an avalanche.

“Plus,” Zayn adds, “I didn’t want him to shoot at me.” His laugh is harsh, and tired, and edged with an angry sarcasm that makes Niall’s stomach do a tight flip. Zayn rolls over to press his face against Niall’s neck. “Don’t look so worried,” Zayn sighs. “I’ll get over it.”

But something dark and creeping is already taking shape in the back of Niall’s mind. It does seem a little peculiar, doesn’t it? That Liam would be right there in Zayn’s path for him to meet, and then at the forest as though he’d been waiting for them. Like maybe…

Niall swallows. Like maybe he’d been lured there. _Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a whole different world._ So who brought Liam into it?

“Shit,” says Niall, to no one in particular. Zayn snores into his shoulder. Niall eases his way out from under him and then puts him to bed as carefully as he can. Zayn curls into the pillow on Niall’s uncomfortable mattress. He doesn’t look very frightening at all.

Niall grabs his hoodie and sets off across the grass rolling in a gentle breeze, silvery white in the moonlight. Niall plunges into the darkness of the forest, wrapping the velvety darkness around himself like a cloak.

“Where are you going?” someone asks.

Niall jumps and comes down with fangs bursting out of his mouth, the tips of his fingers curled into claws. Perrie doesn’t look very impressed. “For Christ’s sakes!” Niall blurts.

Perrie just looks him over critically, her mouth set in a not-very-impressed pucker. “You look tired,” she observed, “but not…hm…really, where _are_ you going?”

“To talk to Harry,” Niall answers. “Christ. What are you, a faery? D’you mind, like, not sneaking up on me?”

Perrie shrugs. “It’s not that I mean to, love. I go where I’m needed, you see. Appear, rather. You’re going to see Harry. Ugh. I don’t want to think about you hooking up with someone, thanks.”

“Not like that,” Niall splutters. He almost trips over an oak root. His cheeks feel so hot they might start steaming in the cold. He lets the wolf live right under the surface, just in case. In case of Liam, or the pack that took over the territory Zayn just lost, or…anything, really. It could be so many things. “No, I. I need to talk to him.”

“You think the witches are wrong,” Perrie observes. She climbs neatly over a fallen tree and rejoins Niall’s side without so much as a drop of sweat. Niall gives himself a beat to listen to the din of the sleeping forest: owls’ soft _Who? Who?_ and the soft murmur of a family of mice squeaking in the root system of a tree not far off. Quiet. “Is that what you’re going to talk about? I have to say, it’s not like you to run away.”

Niall chews on the inside of his cheek. No, it’s not, but it’s not like he and Zayn have very many options left, either. He and Zayn don’t stand a chance against Louis and Harry and their vampire friends. And the rest of their pack is too far away to call for backup. Zayn might be willing to gamble everything he has on not backing down, but Niall can’t risk Zayn, or the pack, or Theo. They can find different territory. Right now, what they need is an exit strategy.

 “Harry doesn’t, either,” Niall tells Perrie instead of answering. “He just went along with it to get me to agree. So he wouldn’t have to worry about Zayn.”

“Mm,” Perrie says. “And how has that worked, hm? Because it seems like Zayn wasn’t really Harry’s main concern.”

Niall finds himself slowing down. It’s hard to keep up such a focused stride with Perrie’s soft voice filling his head. “What do you mean?”

“Louis,” Perrie says simply, “might need more help than he can admit.”

Niall stalls. “But that means…” It’s not so unlike Harry had said. They needed an impasse, a reason not to fight. He just hadn’t added that he wanted them to work together.

Isn’t that what they’d been doing, though? Harry volunteered to look into Niall’s weird dream at once. _I can help,_ he’d written, looking at Niall as though he was asking for his help instead. “Shit,” Niall breathes. If Perrie’s right, and if Louis and Zayn are even capable of cooperating…

Except.

Except someone put Liam in Zayn’s path. They must’ve – those things don’t just happen. And only Harry knew where he and Niall set out for that morning.

“A prophecy,” Perrie says. “It’s not like a fortune-telling. It’s not really about your personal future, or even his, or someone else’s. A prophecy is just someone telling you that the way things are is the way they’re meant to be.”

Niall hesitates, rocking on his heels. Perrie leans her hip against a tree, her arms folded across her chest, and looks at him. Niall says, “That’s an awful lot like what Harry said, actually.”

Perrie clucks her tongue. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice,” she says, like Niall’s not even spoken. “The opposite, actually. You can live up to your fate, or not. It’s up to you.”

“And if I don’t?” Niall asks. He keeps seeing the world fall away and disintegrate like ashes on the wind after the vision of himself and Harry kissing. His fate ends in disaster, even if the witches promised him it was what was meant to be. What kind of fate is that?

Perrie shrugs. “That’s up to you,” she just says.

Niall looks down at the muddy toes of his tennis shoes. By the time he looks up again, Perrie’s gone.

He keeps on to the edge of Zayn’s territory, which spills over onto neutral ground. On the other side of that ever diminishing space, somewhere, is Harry’s and Louis’s den. Niall doesn’t have a plan so much as he does a general idea that he’ll shift and sniff them out. He’s enjoying being human right now, though. Witches and prophecies are a lot more difficult to believe in when he’s just an average guy. The taste of snow pricks at his tongue, and the woods feel damp and alive all around him.

He’s so absorbed in his thoughts that the wolf finds him before he notices it. A beam of moonlight glints off the wolf’s bright eyes, and Niall sucks in a quick, sharp breath, his body poised on the knife’s edge of fight or flight. Then he looks closer.

“Christ’s sakes, Harry,” Niall says. He means to say agitated and grumpy. It comes out sounding a lot closer to relieved. In spite of himself, he’s happy to see Harry. He’s not like Zayn, not quite; Niall would protect Zayn with his life and trade all his days for Zayn’s happiness. In Harry, Niall feels more like he has an ally. “Scared the shit out of me.”

Harry gives a soft, huffing breath that sounds eerily like his laugh. He daintily steps through the brush without snapping a single branch. Niall extends his hand without thinking about it and Harry nudges his head up under Niall’s fingertips. Moving on instinct, Niall scritch-scratches his fingers through Harry’s scruff. Harry sends up a gentle, desultory roar from the middle of his chest that fades out quickly. Niall watches, fascinated, as Harry relaxes muscle by muscle. He nuzzles Niall’s leg.

“You’re a bit too big to be a lapdog, Harry,” Niall laughs. Almost reluctantly, he takes his hand out of Harry’s silky fur and slips it back into his pocket. Harry sits back on his haunches and considers Niall thoughtfully, like he can tell something’s up. He whines high in his throat. It sounds a lot like, _I wish…_ Niall coughs. “I think we should talk.”

Niall’s never seen anyone shift so slowly before. Harry does it piece by piece. Niall remembers watching those videos of human beings evolving from different species of the _homo_ genus. This is a lot like that. Harry emerges on the other end of the shift looking soft and warm in a fur-lined coat. His eyes are the light green of the sea after a storm. “You look serious,” Harry observes.

Niall shrugs. It seems the best he can do, all things considered. “How’d you find Liam?”

Harry raises his eyebrows. “What?” He shakes his head. “I knew he must’ve brought the wolfsbane, and from there it wasn’t hard to sight him –”

“Not today. Before that. I mean, how’d you bring him here? To Zayn, and me. And Deo.”

“Niall,” Harry says.

Niall shakes his head. “He said some hunters from Nevada tipped him off that werewolf hunting was good around here. So, what, you pretended to be a hunter and convinced them to move in here to pick off your own kind? Another pack of wolves wasn’t threatening enough?”

Harry starts to say his name again. Niall cuts him off before he can, because Niall’s name in Harry’s mouth sounds too familiar, too close to his heart. Niall’s pretty damn hard to kill. He’s so, so easy to hurt. “I mean, I just don’t get it, I guess. That very first night, you could’ve killed us. Me. But, what, that wouldn’t have been enough?”

“What are you talking about?” Harry finally gets out.

Niall shakes his head. His stomach feels watery. He has the feeling that if he tried to enumerate every single way that Zayn’s heart’s been broken, and the ways he broke it himself, he might throw up. “Because if that’s the case,” Niall pushes on, “for Christ’s sakes, we’ll just go. Staying isn’t worth – this.”

The thing is, Harry actually looks hurt. That’s the only way to describe it – he looks wounded. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Niall.” Niall can’t bear to look at his face, at once so familiar and so new. He looks away. It doesn’t stop Harry from talking. “But yeah, I…I kind of hoped. I thought first it might be Zayn, that he’d come around, if I reached out to him. I don’t think he even really thought about it before he said no. So then I thought maybe you.

“It’s strange, you know, ‘cos you’ve got no idea the way you look. That first time we met, I couldn’t half-see you behind Zayn. Shielding you. You were hurt. I didn’t think you’d make it through the night, to be honest. And then that next time. I thought Louis kept missing, that his jaw was broken. Something. His teeth seemed to just slide right off you.”

Niall remembers that night. That fight. Zayn told him to hold his post at the town water tower, and Niall meant to try, whatever it took. Louis’s teeth didn’t slide off. They hurt, actually. Quite a lot.

“So,” Harry shrugs, a little helplessly. “Yeah. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want Louis to die, either. I’d have done just about anything to protect him. You know what that’s like.”

And Niall does. Abruptly he’s so tired that he feels like he might just pass out standing up. Maybe he’ll wake up as a tree. Being a faery seems like an awful lot less work than being a werewolf. “Louis doesn’t think Zayn can cooperate, does he?” Niall asks. Just to check, really.

Harry’s mouth goes tight and tense. “You’re my mate,” he says breezily, lightly. Water is wet, the sun will rise, and Niall’s Harry’s mate. Never mind how the words make Niall’s heart clench inside his chest. “He can’t touch him. Trust me, it’ll work. It has to.” He takes a deep breath. “He wants to go back to the city. I think we should go together.”  

The animal instinct to pack up, to find allies, to rely on backup courses through him as strong as any wolf. Niall’s not sure if it’s the animal inside him or the human. He runs his hands through his hair a few times, more for the sensation than anything. There’s so many reasons to let himself go, to do this. There’s only one reason not to. Niall self-consciously rubs his palm over his chest. “But?”

“But,” Harry pinches his bottom lip. He looks several decades younger than he had just a moment ago. “Louis knows what I’m like when I’m in love.”

And oh, there it is. There’s just the little matter that Harry doesn’t love Niall. It feels like a kick to the chest. Niall makes himself look unimpressed. “Yeah?” he asks. He sounds scraped thin, like a pair of jeans worn to bare threads, to his own ears. “How?”

Harry touches his own chin and mumbles something almost incoherent. That’s alright. Niall thinks he knows.

“Handsy,” he suggests.

Harry tucks his chin to his chest. “Look. I was coming to find you to tell you I think we should meet up tomorrow. All of us. I know you think…well, you have your doubts. But this has to work. Otherwise, we’ll kill each other before anyone else gets the chance to.”

“So what do you want me to do?” Niall asks.

“Kiss me,” Harry answers.

“No,” Niall says. Partly in answer, partly in general, to maybe the whole universe at large. How cruel it is for him to get exactly what he wants in the way he least wants it.

Harry says, “Fine, I’ll kiss you,” and does. Niall has enough time to steel himself before Harry’s mouth is pressed against his for two seconds, three. His lips are soft and a little chapped. It’s not a kiss, Niall tells himself. More like an accident. Harry pulls back frustrated, hurt-sounding again. “C’m _on,_ Niall,” he says. “Kiss me.” His big hands are splayed across Niall’s chest. There’s nothing very soft about it, or welcoming, or even wanting, really.

Harry’s so stupid, Niall thinks furiously. Idiot. Of the two of them, Niall’s not the one that’s going to blow their stupid act. Fuck, he thinks. “Fine,” he says.

He puts his hands on either side of Harry’s face and leans in. There’s a split second where Harry’s breath fans across Niall’s face and Niall pauses, a broad untouched land unfolding open inside his chest. It feels like morning over the flatlands with dew sparkling on the grass and tendrils of sunlight spilling out over the horizon like veins. It feels like the world spinning by underneath his tires at eighty miles an hour with no end in sight, like running flat out without ever getting tired. Niall kisses him.

The first time Niall shifted, he felt like he’d been struck by lightning. Energy coursed through him like a lightning rod, whiting out everything in his head besides the surging, thundering power of the transformation. It felt like all of the childish half-forgotten dreams he’d had that he should be _big_ , that he couldn’t possibly be as small and unimportant as his body, crashed so loudly out of him that they cracked the sky. He didn’t feel small. He felt infinite.

That same feeling unwinds inside Niall’s chest now, as Harry easily parts his lips. His grip on Niall’s shirt becomes grasping rather than holding. Niall can feel his heart beating wildly inside his chest, or maybe it’s Harry’s, or maybe it’s both of theirs.

Harry tastes sweet. Some distant, cognizant part of Niall’s brain isn’t surprised.

Electricity dances along the surface of Niall’s skin. He tilts his head and one of his fangs brushes against Harry’s. Every synapse in his brain must light up like a beacon, because he feels hypersensitive, a raw nerve. Niall wants to feel that again, and again, and again. Instead, Niall stills to hold off the shift, his breath mingling with Harry’s in the bare few centimeters between their faces. Steam curls off Niall’s and Harry’s bare skin into the crystalline night.

“Yeah,” Harry says, his voice hoarse. “Like that.”

***

Niall doesn’t remember leaving his bed back at the house. He’s not even sure he’s awake right now, actually. A thick layer of fog lays over the forest floor like a blanket, and even the owls’ _Who? Who?_ have dropped away to quiet. Tree branches creak in a breeze that whispers through the air like the rasp of snakeskin over sand, and Niall shivers in a cold that he can’t quite feel, his breath leaving his lungs in a fan of condensation.

He moves forward without really thinking about it and snaps a twig under his foot. Niall glances down to check but it’s not his sneakered foot that he finds, it’s his wolf paw.

A thrill of dread drills through Niall’s chest like a battering ram. Jesus Christ. Oh, shit. Christ. He doesn’t remember how he got here, or when he shifted, or why, and God only knows what he did while he was outside of his own head, oh God…

The cold wet press of the ground is what alerts him to the fact that he’s sunken to his belly. He can’t hear himself breathing like this the way he can when he’s human, but his breath feels like sandpaper against the inside of his lungs, and he wants so badly to shift back, to feel his own warm palms against his face, the salt-sweet tang of his own tears.

Instead, as if of its own accord, his body rises back up to four paws. His head cocks interestedly; Niall can’t make out any sound in particular, just leaves and wind and the peculiar eerie silence of a city buzzing with electricity not so very far off. He breaks into a sprint without meaning to. Slowly but surely, the realization sinks in that Niall’s not in control anymore. He’s just the wolf now, and himself locked somewhere inside. Niall screams soundlessly.

The wolf slows to a trot on soft padded feet, his nostrils flaring. Niall finally catches sight of the scent the wolf’s hung on to. It smells human. It smells like food.

Niall comes awake with a gasp, his heart beating so hard in his chest that surely it’s just a matter of time till it gives out. His legs feel trapped and strangled, and Niall flails out, trying desperately to make contact with himself in this dark, quiet room, and an ever loosening grasp on what’s real and what’s not.

The last of the blankets slide off his legs and land soundlessly on the floor, but that doesn’t stop the panic attack from closing over Niall’s chest like a vice. Jesus fucking Christ. He dreamt of a body on the ground and then he went and Deo died, and now he’s dreaming of the wolf consuming him alive like the Red Riding Hood myth, but he doesn’t want to live inside the belly of some beast, and Jesus Christ, he can’t _breathe_  -

Someone whomps him on the back, not too gently. Niall clutches his chest and squeezes his eyes shut, pain radiating out from the strike zone like little tendrils of electricity. “Shit,” the person says, and loops their arm around his shoulders. The blankets felt like strangulation but this embrace feels like the only thing keeping him from falling apart at the seams. The shift roils over him like a storm over the ocean, half-wave, half-cloud. His fingers taper and sharpen into claws, then return to human, over and over again. Niall’s mouth aches with the stress of sprouting fangs and receding them, and his stomach quivers sickeningly. Niall listens to someone murmur about “Count your breaths, breathe with me,” but the words don’t have meaning.

“Niall,” someone says. Niall recognizes the voice, distantly. Zayn. Increasingly firm, and worried, “Niall.” Finally, in the voice he only ever reserves for when he’s most upset, Zayn barks, “Niall! Breathe.” His words resonate with the peculiar intonation of an alpha. Niall sucks in a breath, not that he much wants to. His lungs hurt. Niall closes his eyes and takes another, and another.

“There you go,” Zayn says. He tangles his fingers in the back of Niall’s hair and Niall lets himself slump forward against Zayn’s chest.

No, he didn’t swear any oath to Zayn. He didn’t need to. Not when he’s counting on Zayn just to keep him sane.

Niall settles back into himself slowly, like an old person easing themselves down into a comfy chair. God. He takes one less painful breath, then another.

Finally, Zayn asks, “What the fuck?”

But Niall doesn’t want to tell him. It’s too much like admitting defeat; like disappointing Zayn for losing himself to the shift, and disappointing himself, that he couldn’t do better. Do more. Niall thinks back to the witches’ presentation of the future, and the claws sprouting out of his fingertips even as Harry kissed him and the rest of the world collapsed like a stage curtain revealing all of the ugly inner workings. And he knows it’ll have been his fault, somehow.

 _Yes,_ they’d said.

It’s not too late to turn back. Tell Zayn here, and now, that his thing with Harry is a farce and that they really ought to just skip town and come back to reclaim it someday a long, long time from now, when the years will have snatched away so much of what makes Harry himself.

But it feels too late for that already. Niall lied to Zayn. What does he have left but Zayn’s trust? And he owes it to Zayn to find him someplace safe. Harry and Louis think the city will be easier to lose themselves in, to regroup in before whatever increasingly aggressive force finally attacks.

And. And Theo’s there. Niall pictures his sweet, round face, the way he’d smile back at Niall before he could even roll over onto his stomach, and he thinks, he can have that. If the wolf consumes him, the least he can do is go play with Theo one last time. Give him a hug. Toss him into the air. Smell the top of his fine-haired head.

“We gotta get out of town,” Niall says, at length. Zayn stiffens, but doesn’t say anything. It feels like as much of a consensus as he needs.

***

Niall makes a beeline for the edge of Louis’s territory the moment his turn to patrol starts just before dawn. In the few hours between waking up from a nightmare and setting across the dew-covered grass on long, human legs, Niall sat in the bathtub with his knees drawn up to his chest and thought about how much he’d like to wake up one day with nowhere to go.

He’d like to just lie in bed all day or splay out on the couch watching a year’s worth of soccer. Getting his shit together and maybe trying out college. Scheduling silly, exciting dates with someone he wasn’t half-afraid wanted to kill him or worse, break his heart.

The thing about thinking that you’re not going to make it is that you won’t. You have to trick yourself into believing that you’ll make it, and then one day – Niall thinks – maybe he will have.

He rocks on his heels at the boundary line. Niall doesn’t feel hesitant so much as he does uncertain, tentative. He knows what he has to do but not quite how to do it. His nervous stomach does a familiar slow roll.

“Looking for Harry?” someone asks.

Niall just about jumps out of his skin. He whirls, pushing the wolf down as far as it’ll go, and spots Louis leaning against a tree a mere few feet away. His arms are crossed over his chest and his eyebrow is quirked up into a dubious, almost mocking smirk.

“Fuck,” says Niall, articulately. Then, “Yeah, as a matter of fact. I am.”

Louis’s mouth does a curious thing: he purses his lips, and then he presses his expression back into a smirk, his eyes flickering like the shift in his posture brought some kind of inner light into focus for a split second. Niall zeroes in on his body language, the set of his weight across his feet. Louis’s claws _hurt,_ Niall remembers.

“Well,” says Louis. “He sent me to tell you to leave him alone.”

Niall’s heart drops like a stone. “What?”

Louis shrugs. He studies his neatly manicured fingernails with as much interest as if they held the secrets of the universe. Niall suddenly realizes that Louis is actually stood quite close to him. Niall can see the faint freckles across the bridge of his nose and the splash of green in his eyes. His anxiety level ticks up another notch. “Apparently, he’s had enough of you. Besides, we’re leaving town, anyway. It’s really for the best. You know what they say about long distance.”

Niall’s brain ticks over slowly, like an engine without enough fuel in the line. “You’re lying.” He doesn’t sound entirely certain to his own ears. Niall clears his throat. “You’re lying to me.”

This time, when Louis angles his head, he stops right at the spot where the light inside shines through. His head is within arm’s reach of Niall’s. His claws are, too. “You really care,” he marvels.

Niall fights all of the aggravation and the irritation he can muster. “Is that what you came to do? Vet me?”

“Hm, wait, let me see which ‘vet’ joke I want to chase first,” Louis snorts.

The thought occurs to Niall, however briefly, that he could just grab Louis by his shoulders and scream something about how this isn’t a teen movie and for God’s sakes, he doesn’t have to impress Niall. Niall’s already pretty concerned with avoiding the sting of his fangs and claws, thanks.

So he collects himself and says, “Where is he?”

“Sent me,” Louis shrugs. “Well, I should say he told me he could take this patrol and I thought, ‘Now why would he want to do that?’ I will say it’s an awful lot earlier than I usually wake up. And that you’re not his usual type.”

Niall folds his arms across his chest. He’s acutely mindful of the way his hair has dried sticking straight up, and that he doesn’t look particularly menacing in his hoodie and jeans, and that Louis looks flawlessly scruffy in his artfully torn jeans and faded band shirt.

“And you’d know?” Niall asks.

The corner of Louis’s mouth lifts. “Why do you think he’s in my pack, then?”

Niall must do something with his face, because Louis grins. “Has he done this yet? All deep and soulful?” He reaches plainly across the boundary line to cradle Niall’s face in his palm. His thumb brushes tenderly over Niall’s cheek. “If you make eye contact with even a stranger for sixty seconds, chances are you’ll fall in love,” Louis says seriously, his gaze locked on Niall’s. His skin feels like the soft buzzing shock of an electrified fence against Niall’s face.

“Not being rude,” Niall says, “but if you don’t get your hand off of me soon, I’m going to eat it.”

Louis laughs but takes his hand away. His eyes are all layers of shutters again, like one of those fancy Russian nesting dolls. It’s too late, though, Niall thinks. He’s stared into the abyss and Louis has stared back. The worst part is, Niall doesn’t think he’s lying. Not about the him-and-Harry part, anyway. He feels especially dingy compared to Louis, in all his pack leader glory. Niall’s stomach rumbles. He really wants a donut.

“So,” Louis says. He clears his throat. When he speaks again, his voice is like something out of an elementary school class clown. His eyes are entirely serious. “Take me to your leader.”

Niall doesn’t dare shift in front of Louis, not when he hardly knows what he’ll do, so instead he tries to think from Zayn’s point of view. He likes being alone while Niall runs the border. He used to go visit Liam, but that was before. These days…actually, Niall knows just where to find him.

Louis insists on chatting through their brisk walk across town. It’s really only a few miles; Niall’s used to it, but probably Louis drives more. Maybe that’s why he fills Niall’s brain with a nonstop running commentary on Fall Out Boy, the state of the Seattle Seahawks’ offense, and how there’s no good soccer team in the surrounding tri-state area. Niall only barely avoids answering him at that.

Anyway, it’s sort of nice, in its way. Louis’s high, buoyant voice, and the tone of his words. Niall doesn’t have many meaningless conversations these days.

The old skate park looks just as close to the edge of ruin as Zayn’s and Niall’s house. Faded police tape flutters in the faint breeze between the entry booth and the turnstile that used to let half-stoned skateboarders in for the low fee of two dollars. Niall hardly ever has the feel of ghosts in a cemetery, but he gets it in places like these, places where people seem to have left something living behind.

Zayn’s not in the chipped cement half pipe, or the kidney-shaped skate bowl, or the collection of fully enclosed pipes big enough to fit a small elephant. Niall can’t fathom what those are for. Can someone really skate on the ceiling? Are they just places to cool off?

Niall smells him before he sees him. Niall hears the familiar rattle and clink of Zayn shaking a spray paint can, and then, even from yards off, he can smell the acrylic hitting the air. It smells like rubber and his own mom stress cleaning when Niall was a little boy, and more than that it smells like painting pumpkins metallic shades of gold and silver to better match the blue shutters on their little house. The smell is always one that makes Niall rock back on his heels, overwhelmed by memories. It’s not a bad thing.

“Zayn,” Niall starts carefully. Zayn glances over his shoulder, his eyes narrow and his brow furrowed, and a surge of fierce defensive tenderness washes over Niall. And then Zayn pounces on him.

It all happens nearly too fast to track. One instant Niall’s looking at Zayn, familiar Zayn with that jaw and those eyelashes and the same crappy jean jacket he’s been wearing for two states now. The next, the paint can in Zayn’s hand is clattering to the ground, and Zayn’s shifting in midair with a sound like a ream of paper being torn in half. He lands on Niall with the force of a semi-truck and Niall goes down hard on the dusty cement. Zayn’s claws bite into his shoulders and the back of Niall’s head feels like a split watermelon, he’s cracked it on the ground so hard. He lets out an unintentional little gasp of pain.

“How long?” Zayn snarls. “How long have you been working for him, you little prick? This whole fucking time?”

“Zayn,” Niall says. His head feels like a rung bell, and his eyes are blurry. He thinks maybe he’s hit his head quite hard. Part of him screams to shift, to fight back, and the other part can’t. The minute he shifts into the wolf he’s outside of his own head, and Zayn’s in there, too. He feels like his brain’s been cleaved in half, almost, like the two globes are peeling apart inside his skull. Shit. “You’re – stop, don’t,” he manages.

Zayn bears down harder, his glistening fangs mere inches from Niall’s face, his throat. Niall thinks of all the times he’s woken up to Zayn fitting himself under Niall’s arm, the hours he’s spent loitering inside comic book stores and tattoo shops watching Zayn carefully consider each of his options before he buys the first thing he picked up, Zayn patiently watching Niall study transit maps, the kindly, insistent weight of Zayn inside his head, filling every moment with the warmth and surety of his presence.

Niall opens his mouth to say…something, he’s not sure how much he can get out with no breath, and Louis pulls Zayn off of him. He doesn’t even shift to do it, just reaches down and grabs Zayn by the joint in his back leg and _heaves._ Zayn’s claws shred the battered collar of Niall’s shirt and scrape lightly down his chest. It stings, but it’s so much less than it could be. Niall props himself up on his elbows to watch Louis bear his fangs, his jaw modulating toward something far more animal, and Zayn lets out a shrill, sharp, sad note. Niall covers his ears. He should dive into the shift and reach out to Zayn. He should stop Louis from doing more damage than he already has. He should – he should –

“If you’d calm down,” Louis says, in his high, commanding voice, “we’d both be happy to answer. Can you even shift right now?”

Zayn growls deep, deep down in his chest, but his eyes are – he just looks hurt. Niall swallows. There’s so much to tell Zayn, though; he means too much for Niall to explain it in just a scant few words, he needs time, he needs so much time. He just doesn’t have it.

Zayn lowers his furry belly almost flat down on the cement, preparing to spring, and Niall closes his eyes, reaching out to find the wolf locked inside himself somewhere. He’s seen Louis and Zayn fight before, and it’s not something he’s keen on seeing again. Nor watching Zayn grit his teeth in pain for days after as he waits to heal up.

“Wh – Hey!” An unfamiliar voice. Niall cranes his head to look round, and there’s a man stood on the edge of the skate bowl they’re in. The shadow he casts across the bowl is eerily long; he reminds Niall of one of those Slender Man things he used to hear about, a camp fire story before Niall’s life became one of them, too. Niall opens his mouth to say – something, he has his breath back, just not his words, and the wind shifts.

Vampire. Niall would know that smell anymore. He scrambles over to Zayn’s side, mindless of their own personal drama. He’s just moving on instinct. The vampire leaps over the side of the bowl and comes down on Louis’s side, his shoulders broadening, his jaw reshaping itself to allow for the glistening fangs that drop down from his gums.

When another wolf slides down the side of the incline, Niall’s hardly surprised. Louis looks calm, composed, even, while he waits to see what Zayn will do. It feels like the last six months’ worth of nightmares rolled into one single, endless moment. Two packs gone, just like that – and the worst part is, Niall knows it’ll have been for nothing. He closes his fist around the memory of Theo in his heart.

And Harry crosses the divide with his tail and head hung so low they almost brush the ground. He moves slowly, carefully; Niall allows himself to notice how beautiful Harry makes the wolf look. Almost without thinking about it, Niall holds out his hand. Harry noses his cold damp snout into Niall’s palm, and Niall can’t help the disbelieving huff he gives, or the way he strokes his hand over Harry’s hand and down his neck. Harry leans far too much of his weight against Niall’s skinny legs like he’s not planning on moving anytime soon. The tension drains out of the skate bowl like someone pulled the plug.

“Well,” says Louis. Niall can hear his heart rate decelerate. The vampire at his side straightens and loses some of that freak fighting bulk. Zayn reappears from teeth and fur slowly, his eyes soft and sad and not least hurt. The divide in Niall’s skull loses some of its insistency, like Zayn’s less intent on breaking the bond between them.

Niall clears his throat. “I’m still yours,” he tells Zayn, with Harry’s furry head under his palm.

Zayn blinks. His eyes seem locked on the wolf at Niall’s feet. Harry calmly gazes back at him. Niall realizes how it must look to him, and to Louis, and to the vampire whose rotting-blood smell roils Niall’s stomach every time he gets a whiff of it. “You can’t be all of ours,” is all Zayn says. Then, “I suppose that’s what you want?”

The “you” feels exclusive, like Niall’s party to something that doesn’t include Zayn. It makes Niall’s insides twist. He curls his fingers around Harry’s soft fur and thinks about how he should’ve said something different, and sooner, but he’s not sure what. Harry’s insistent weight against Niall’s shins feels like as much of an obstruction between him and Zayn as it does something Niall wanted so badly, for so long. And it’s not even real. He takes a deep breath. “Yeah.”

Louis gives a slight cough. He steps forward, toward Zayn, with his right hand extended. “Louis Tomlinson,” he introduces himself grandly. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.”

Zayn cuts his eyes toward Niall for a long, long second before he wipes his palm off on his jeans and takes Louis’s hand. Something clicks inside Niall’s brain. It’s weird, it’s sort of like – it’s sort of like they look like they fit together. Harry gives a low whine, and Niall realizes he’s been pulling too hard on Harry’s fur.

The vampire takes an interested look at Harry. “Why don’t you shift back, you kinky bastard,” it asks warmly. God. It’s always been the creepiest thing, the way vampires can sound human, still. Niall’s empty stomach cramps.

Harry gives another one of those huffing little breaths that sound like laughter, and then he closes his eyes. He really is much too big to be a lapdog. Niall can’t find it inside himself to tell Harry to move away, though.

“Nick,” the vampire says, with a dismissive wave toward itself. “And you must be Niall.”

Niall eyes him uneasily. He can’t look at the weird, nonhuman creature that the vampire is without a roll of displeasure in his stomach. He looks _wrong_ , and freakish.

And Niall thinks of Liam. Of how he didn’t know wolves could still be human. Of how badly he needs this to work, and how wanting something hard enough can take your choices away. Niall lowers himself carefully to the ground and Harry sets his heavy head on Niall’s leg. “Niall,” Niall says, and swallows past the revulsion in his stomach. “It’s nice to meet you.” 

***

Louis and Zayn talk for what feels like hours. Harry spends the duration of it in wolf form, and never more than an arm’s length away from Niall. Niall lets himself lie flat-out on his back and stare up at the cottony gray clouds stretched thin overhead. Harry sets his head resolutely on Niall’s stomach, so Niall keeps stroking the soft fur over his ears. Louis’s and Zayn’s voices drone on about how neither of them _need_ each other, obviously, but it’d sure be a hell of a lot easier to get the other’s help.

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep.

The dream starts out as a memory. Niall watches himself and Harry slip into the Goodwill through the window he jimmied open as though outside of his own body. Niall and Harry pick their way across the store, into the backroom, into the witches’ presence. He watches himself and Harry sit down in front of the witches’ desk and join hands, and the future plays out in front of them like a song they can’t turn off. Then the vision tilt shifts, and it’s like someone hits the rewind button on Niall’s life, because time slips backward.

Niall and Zayn visiting the witches, Harry propositioning Niall for the first time, Niall taking the command from Zayn to take Harry’s meeting and see if there was intel he could use. Days and weeks and months earlier than that. It’s a four dimensional TV screen that Niall can’t wrench his eyes away from.

He and Zayn, months younger and somehow even hungrier then than now, ditch their stolen car by the side of the road and continue the rest of their way to town on foot. Niall’s been shot, and Zayn’s reeling from the rush of new territory gained. They have just a few small outposts left, and then they can make a move on the city, just like Zayn always wanted. A city is so hard to claim, but. It was always the but that had Niall taking even Zayn’s poor assignments into consideration.

But. It’s funny how much that one little word feels like hope.

But someone has had the same idea. They’ve moved south from Washington into Oregon. Of all places, the two packs run across each other in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, called Mohegan. An equal and opposite force.

Louis and Harry look like city wolves. The presumption that they’ve already won sets Zayn’s teeth on edge, and Niall lets the wolf a little looser off the chain. It’s nothing momentous, or even all that purposeful, that draws their fight to a stop. It’s an accident. Someone gets lost on a country road, and none of them are the kind to kill a person just for getting lost. The fight gets put off. They all live.

Before that, Niall and Zayn standing in a bus terminal, Niall memorizing green and yellow and blue routes. “That one,” Niall points, and Zayn asks, “Where to next?”

 Maybe that’s destiny, Niall thinks again. Maybe fate is just doing whatever you had planned in the first place, and hoping it works out. If you get what you want, it’s fate. If you don’t, then it must be fate, too.

The dream shifts suddenly and violently, like a slap to the face. Niall’s back in the middle of the old dream again, the one where the wolf is breathing hot on his tail. Except this time, he seems to be the wolf in pursuit, and there’s one in front of him he desperately needs to catch up to.

The forest whips by with drunken, lurching speed. The ground contracts under the wolf’s paws unevenly, like whatever mechanism it is that enables wolves to travel so far so fast isn’t holding steady. Something is wrong with this wolf. The moment Niall realizes, he feels the wolf’s quivering muscles, tastes the burnout in his brain. It feels like a wolf who hasn’t rested in a long, long time. A wolf whose connection to humanity is as tenuous as Niall’s feels sometimes. Instead of taking a breath and making himself human again, the wolf steadies on, his paws hitting the forest floor heavily.

It doesn’t feel right. The fear and adrenaline surging through Niall’s veins feel out of place, not so much terrified as…oh. But he’s not the wolf he usually is. He’s the hunter. The fear is only for what he has yet to lose.

Somehow, the other wolf starts to pull away. A string of fear is plucked inside Niall’s chest that resonates like a guitar chord, echoing and echoing like it’ll never end. In a panic, he makes a desperate leap, and his fangs catch the flank of the fleeing wolf. The wolf’s back leg flails out and both Niall and it go down hard, his body battered by tree root and rock.

Slowly, achingly, Niall feels himself shake his head and climb back up to his feet. The other wolf must’ve shifted back after the collision, because when Niall lifts his head, there’s a girl leaning against a tree just a few feet away. Her hair hangs in front of her face and she’s flushed and sweating, but the resemblance is uncanny. She looks just like Harry.

***

Niall wakes up to wolves howling in the distance. He sits up quickly, going light-headed as the blood rushes out of his head, and struggles to focus. Louis’s sat on the edge of the bowl while Zayn shakes a paint can, one hand on his hip, and the vampire -  the vampire is staring right back at him. Niall’s breath catches in his chest. “Where’s Harry?” he asks.

“He lives,” the vampire observes dryly, his tone saturated with humor. Niall draws his knees up to his chest, his heart rate absurdly spiking up, and a peal of thunder wracks the sky. It sounds like a pair of tennis shoes rattling around in the dryer, the sound is so booming and close; it can’t be far off. Another wolf howls, sharp and high, brittle-like.

Louis and Zayn go tense and still. “Is that –” Louis starts, and Zayn shakes his head, says, “Not mine.”

The penny drops with an almost audible sound. Zayn’s southern border has fallen. Another pack is closing in. Niall scrambles to his feet. “Harry,” he repeats blankly. The fizzling, sparking feel of adrenaline has already started leaking into his system. The first few drops of rain plink down onto his forehead, the back of his hand. Niall makes himself swallow and take a breath.

“Here,” Harry says, bounding down into the bowl and to Niall’s side. He’s himself again, although he looks windblown and cold, and rain slicks his curls down against his head. A tendril of hair is plastered against his forehead. He must’ve been doing recon. “They’re coming,” he tells Louis curtly. His fingers curl around Niall’s wrist, so Niall twists his hand to catch Harry’s hand in his. He feels…more than complicit in their scheme, but like a player in it. Like he and Harry might’ve actually given them a chance. Niall doesn’t dare meet Zayn’s eyes.

The vampire climbs to his feet. He towers a good half a head over Louis, who snaps off quick orders with the ease of long practice. “We’ll go back to ours and get our stuff. The car. Harry can direct us to yours. You’ve got twenty minutes to get your shit together, and then we’re leaving town. Got it?”

“You’re not to give us orders,” Zayn snorts. Then, “Yeah. And we’ll help you get out of town.” Zayn scales the side of the bowl wall, and Grimmy, and then it’s just Niall and Harry left at the bottom. Niall’s not sure where to begin.

“See you in twenty,” Harry says, but doesn’t move away.

Niall lets out an unsteady breath. “You fucking better,” he says, and Harry cracks a grin, and then Niall and Zayn are jogging through the rain. The storm isn’t quite lashing yet, but it’s not drizzling anymore, either. It’s only with a hint of trepidation that Niall follows Zayn into a four-legged sprint. His head feels scrambled and unsteady for so many reasons: these dreams he can’t shake and the knowledge, however unfirmly based, that the wolf is going to consume him, and the distance he feels now between himself and Zayn.

 _“I’m still yours,”_ he remembers saying, and knows it to be true. Now if only Zayn would know it.

They’ve packed in a hurry before, so it’s no struggle to bag their life’s belongings in five minutes or less. Niall grabs the pack he carried from California to Oregon and fills it with the notepad and pencil, the silver bullet he left wrapped inside his torn jeans, his favorite gray hoodie, and the map that’s been folded and unfolded so many times now that it’s starting to wear holes at the seams.

Niall spares just a few precious seconds looking over this room. It’s not quite a home because he was always expecting to leave, but he liked the promise of it. A home, even a temporary one, is still somewhere to store more than one’s things. It makes for a new spot on the map: _I was here._

He doesn’t bother closing the door behind him. Niall joins Zayn downstairs at the front door just a moment later, the straps of his backpack cutting a familiar weight into his shoulders.

“You want the honors?” Zayn asks. He offers Niall his lighter, the one he and Niall bought from Liam just a few days ago. Niall shakes his head, so Zayn switches it on. He lights a tattered dish towel on fire. The blaze spreads slowly across the checkered pattern, still a little blood-stained from the last time he and Zayn fought off another pack.

Zayn tosses the burning towel into the moldering living room. The polyester couch lights up like a Roman candle. Flames jump to the stained carpet and the spray-painted drywall like a living, breathing thing. By the time Niall and Zayn are shifting on the edge of the property, the whole building is on fire, sizzling in the pouring rain.

You can’t go back again, Niall knows better than most.

Louis steers the truck to a halt in the middle of the dirt road that led to Zayn’s and Niall’s rent house. He whistles lowly, peering through the windshield while Zayn and Niall settle in. Niall climbs over the top o the seat to plop down next to Harry. “Did you do that?” Louis asks.

Zayn nods shortly. “Leave no trace,” he says, with the faint, almost comedic curl of his mouth like he’s some kind of Boy Scout.

Louis casts them a sideways glance. “Fucking sick,” he says.

Harry’s hand slides over Niall’s knee. “Good?” he asks, digging his thumb in right where it always hurts. Niall shrugs, then nods. Rain pounds against the outside of the truck and it’s cramped in the cabin, even with two rows of space.

“I’ve had worse,” is all he says. Then, “Where’s your vampire?”

“Doing vampire things,” Louis says vaguely. “Don’t worry. He’s coming.”

“Not quite what he’s worried about,” Zayn says, with a snort.

Louis just rolls his eyes. “Everybody’s a critic,” he says.

The first ten minutes pass with deceptive ease. The old Ford’s tires slip a little on the mud, but Louis pulls them onto the 22, which crosses the I-5 in Salem. And from there it’s a straight shot north. Roughly four hours. Niall can think of plenty of times four hours pass without mention. He doesn’t think they’ll be quite so lucky here, though he hopes.

Louis notices it first. The tires slip a little more on the wet road, the Ford’s headlights sweeping over slick blacktop and wet bark. “Do me a favor,” he says. “Roll down your windows. Check the tires.”

Niall turns the hand crank so the creaky window rolls down and leans his head out. The brisk, cold wind and rain feel good drenching his hair and washing his face clean. He blinks against the feeling and leans a little further out of the window, squinting to make anything out in the driving rain.

It looks…shit. Niall blinks. Vines trail from the grassy side of the road to the Ford’s wheels. It looks like a green spider’s web. Even as Niall watches, and the truck speeds along the highway at forty-five miles an hour, the vines tighten up. New branches grow out of every copse of trees they pass like they’re setting off some kind of trip wire. Niall pulls his head back inside the truck to report back.

“Faeries,” Harry says grimly, his hands fisted in his own lap. “Lou.”

Louis shakes his head. “You want to take your chances with whatever inhuman thing’s out there in the woods? No, you wouldn’t stand a chance.” He clears his throat. “Fuck.”

“What if we pull over?” Niall asks. Hole up, wait for the storm to pass and daylight to dawn. They can make a run for it in wolf form, easy, and they’re much smaller targets.

“We’d be surrounded before sunup,” Zayn remarks, his voice deceivingly cool and calm.

“Shit,” Niall says. He swallows. The answer seems apparent to him, even obvious. That doesn’t mean he likes it one bit. “What if we split up?”

“No,” Harry and Zayn say, at the same time. Harry turns his wide green eyes on Niall.

“We’re too easy of a target like this,” Niall says. They need neutral ground, where the faeries and nature spirits won’t be as easily swayed to run them to ground, where they have a chance at – at what, exactly? Regrouping and making a counterattack? Niall doesn’t want to think about how miserably slim their chances are.

This first. This moment first. He swallows. “If I can take out even one or two of their wolves, they won’t be able to follow us so easily. Or report back to whoever’s giving the order to the fey people.”

“I’ll go,” Zayn says brusquely.

It’s nice of him to offer, but no. “You can’t,” Niall says. “I’m expendable. You’re not.”

Zayn goes tense and terse and too quiet in his seat. Harry says, “I’ll go with you.”

Louis nods shortly. “Just break their line. It’ll give us the advantage we need. And Harry.” Harry pauses with his hand on the door handle, his seat belt already retracting into the seat. “Be careful. You too, Neil.”

“Sure thing, Lewis,” Niall says, and jumps out of the truck after Harry. He tucks and rolls just the way he learned in PE class gymnastics when he was eight years old. He comes up with four paws and a sensitive snout. Highway traffic rushes by on either side of this greenbelt. Harry’s the most overwhelming smell just beside Niall. He glances over, headlights glinting off his green eyes, and Niall snorts. They break into a run.

Wolves are pack hunters, even half-human wolves. Niall experimentally reaches out to brush Harry’s mind with his own, but it’s like he can feel the message not getting through. Of course. They’re not the same pack. Instead, he paces himself at Harry’s side, listening to the rumble-roar-shriek of buses and vans and eighteen-wheelers and compact cars streaming by on the highway.

The first thread of the other pack’s scent smells like a landfill. Niall almost pulls up short, but Harry just runs faster, clinging to the scent. If Louis’s and Harry’s pack smells like hot coffee and hair gel and sunscreen, then this pack smells like something left to die under the hot sun, and the wind blowing over Canada’s barren tundra. It doesn’t smell like a pack should. It doesn’t smell like having each other.

Niall threads his way through the cars on the highway to emerge on the other side, his nose tipped to the air. Harry surfaces on his right. Niall takes a deep breath, and then he sprints after the scent. The other pack is closing in around Louis and Zayn in the truck like a net, Niall can feel. He and Harry stay close together till the pack scent diverges in the middle of the forest bordering the highway, like some of the wolves decided to peel off and pull ahead to put a stop to the truck. Harry lets out a short, sweet howl – _You take those,_ Niall interprets – and continues after his own targets.

Fair enough.

Niall digs down deep for the speed that’s always been customary for him. The whole world narrows down to his focus on following the scent, and the tamp of his paws against the earth as space contracts between every step, and the screaming, exuberant joy of running flat-out. As long as Niall’s been shifting, and as much as he can hate it, he loves this part.

He finds the first wolf nimbly moving along the cliffs overlooking the highway. The highway cuts through the Cascades like a knife, and the mountains rise up on either side like either half of the Red Sea after Moses got through with it. Niall starts the incline up to the overpass where the wolf is waiting to strike, his lungs and legs trembling with the effort of running so many miles so fast. His balance slips on the wet grass and he slides down ten, fifteen feet, unable to regain traction. He gets up with an unintentional little whine. Shit.

His next attempt, Niall tries to dig his claws in, moving carefully up the hill. He’d shift back to human but he’s afraid of losing the other predator’s scent. Now that he’s not running along the other wolf’s trail, though, the rain helps in obscuring exactly where he is; the water runs over everything like sunlight, and the wolf’s scent is everywhere.

Niall’s must be, too. He finds this out when the other wolf comes bounding over the top of the incline and balance be damned, throws itself at Niall. Niall goes rolling ass over teakettle down the side of the slick hill with the other wolf like they’re two children inside a rubber tire, except it’s not stupid fun, it’s dangerous and terrifying. Niall slams against rock outcroppings and barren roots on his way down. The breath gets knocked out of him, and he pushes himself up to his feet slowly, afraid to look away from the other wolf.

The other wolf throws back its head and lets out a spiraling, spiking howl that pierces the night like a bolt of lightning. It’s not a call for help. It’s a sounding call. _I’ve found him._ Niall pitches forward without another thought, his only intent to silence that call.

Niall makes the rookie mistake of having mercy. His jaws close over the other wolf’s jaw and the call peters out with a soft whimper, and Niall thinks, He doesn’t have to do this. Then the wolf wrenches out of Niall’s grasp and turns just in time to scrape its own fangs across Niall’s cheek. His own stupidity stings worse than the cut.

Niall grumbles low in his throat and skips back, orienting himself for another pounce, and pain splits his skull right down the middle. A ghastly thread of fear winds its way through his every thought, and desperation scoops out all of his intention, all of his drive to finish this and get back to the others. Niall lowers himself to his haunches, blindsided by it, just long enough for the other wolf to bounce back. Bloodlust fills Niall’s mouth with saliva, and beneath all the rest, he feels the pounding, driving need to obey.

It’s that that gives him the strength to restrain himself. Zayn can be an asshole but he’s never demanded obedience. Niall gasps in a breath and finds the strength in himself, somehow, to push himself to his feet. The other wolf looks totally confused; maybe he thought Niall was giving up. Niall wouldn’t blame him. For a second there, he thought he was, too. And he’s no idea where it came from.

Instead, Niall jumps. The other wolf is too slow and stupid to squirm out of his clutches. Niall closes his jaws around the wolf’s throat and feels the soft, depressurized gasp of breath when he pierces the other wolf’s throat. And then he feels entirely disgusted with himself for it. The feeling only gets worse when the other wolf shifts back and it’s…it’s a kid. The other wolf can’t be much older or younger than Niall himself, though he looks it in the eyes. He’s rematerialized in just a t-shirt and his boxers, not even shoes, like he’s just a pup.

Niall can’t help himself. He shifts back. “I’m sorry,” he tells the other wolf, who just gurgles, choking on his own blood.

That’s the thing, Niall knows. He’s not a good guy. Good guys don’t kill kids. Good guys don’t kill anyone at all, ideally. Niall’s not a good guy.

He shifts back and scampers down the side of the mountain, buffeted both by the storm and the war raging inside his head. It’s both within and without him, and he doesn’t want to ponder it, not when he knows what’s happening. The wolf’s staking a bigger claim on him every time he shifts, and one of these days, he won’t be able to shake it off and shift back.

Niall lets out a howl into the night, and then he makes for the truck still rumbling along the highway, safer now than before.

Niall remembers finding the girl who looks like Harry in the forest, and he has a bad feeling about what happened to her. It’s getting worse by the day.

***

“They’ll be sending more,” Louis says. The twenty-four hour Safeway shopping basket bumps against his shin, and the plastic bags of chips inside crinkle softly. Louis tosses in a super-sized bag of trail mix. “Till we can reach the city and establish a boundary, there’s not a safe place on Earth for us.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Harry sighs. He still looks chilled in his damp jacket and jeans, his nose rosy. Niall squirms out of his favorite gray hoodie and offers it to Harry, who hesitates just a moment before he accepts it. He’d asked Niall when they were both buckled back into the truck whether his target was as young as Harry’s, and yeah. He doesn’t look pleased about it, either.

Louis shoots him a scalding look. “I’m not being dramatic, I’m being honest. If you two would stop having a tender moment every time I turn my back, I’m sure you’d know better.”

Niall rolls his eyes. He expects Harry to fire something back, but instead he says, “I’m sure Nick’s fine, Lou. In our world, no news is good news.”

“Try telling me that when your idiot boyfriend goes off without you,” Louis sniffs.

“Wait,” Niall starts. Boyfriend?

Louis grabs a large box of Pop-Tarts off the shelf and adds it to his basket. “You can’t judge,” Louis says. “You’re dating him.” He motions to Harry, who has his hands in Niall’s hoodie pockets, his mouth hidden in the collar. Harry shoots Niall a look, and Niall can tell he’s smiling just by the ways his eyes have crinkled up. “Where the hell’s Zayn?” Louis asks. As one, all three of them tilt their heads like wolves tipping up their snouts to catch a scent. Niall smells an old granny’s powdery perfume, and a Powerade spill a couple of aisles over, and on the other side of the store, Zayn.

“He probably had to use the toilet,” Harry guesses.

Louis sighs as if heavily burdened by this. “Well, we better go see if he has any snack prefs, or I’m getting us all raw cookie dough.”

Louis peels off to go get Zayn, but Niall lingers at the fruits and vegetables with Harry, who looks over each apple very intently before he adds it to his grocery bag. The sprinklers kick on and wet the carrots and broccoli and celery in chilled bins along the wall.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been grocery shopping,” Niall remarks.

Harry glances over at him. The quiet between them doesn’t feel awkward, or fraught. It’s soothing just that Harry’s there. “Yeah? How long?”

Niall tries to think back. He’s gone on supply runs with Zayn before, and on scouting expositions he went by himself a handful of times. Mostly, though, he relates grocery shopping back to the days with Theo. He remembers strapping the babbling toddler into a grocery cart and wandering up and down every aisle, eager to stay away from home as long as possible. Without Greg there, it felt empty, and too quiet, even with the TV blaring children’s shows and Theo chattering to himself on the carpet.

“Years,” Niall finally says.

Harry’s eyes sadden. He holds the apple up to his face and takes a deep, deep whiff.

“What are you doing?” Niall asks. Sniffing fruit is…well, he’s seen people do stranger things, but he’s starting to wonder how Harry’s gone his whole life without anyone finding out he’s a wolf.

“C’mere,” Harry says. He puts his hand on Niall’s hip and draws him in. Niall goes easily, disarmed by his scent lingering on the hoodie, and the gentleness of Harry’s touch. “Before – well, all this, my sister and I used to be, like, health nuts. Smell this.”

Niall gamely gives the apple a sniff. “It smells like apple,” he says brilliantly.

Harry shakes his head. “No, take a _real_ breath,” he says insistently. So Niall leans back in and takes a proper, deep breath of apple, weird as that sounds. And he understands what Harry meant. He can smell the orchard where this apple grew from seed to tree to fruit, the soft rich soil and the golden sunlight drizzled over apple tree leaves like honey. “Isn’t it lovely?” Harry asks brightly. “It smells like you.”

“What?” Niall laughs.

Even Harry looks a little sheepish. “Sorry. I mean, it does, though.”

“Really?”

“Mm. You smell like apples and cinnamon and my dad’s old leather wallet.” Harry leans in again, his nose brushing Niall’s hairline. He’s so close that Niall can see the pulse beating in his throat and feel the warmth from his skin. Niall expects him to smell Niall like an apple, but it seems to be enough just to hold Niall close, his breath warm on Niall’s face. Niall thinks about how easy it would be to tip his face up and kiss him, and then he has to remind himself not to move away. Harry’s not really his. He just wants the others to think that he is.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Louis drawls, so Harry lets Niall go with a soft kiss to his forehead that has Niall’s cheeks flaming for no damn good reason at all. “But you won’t believe the deal I got.” Niall turns to find Louis’s rounded up Zayn, and, and Niall can’t believe his eyes, and Liam. “Two for one,” Louis says. His face is smiling. His eyes are not.

Liam has the decency to look abashed.  “Surprise,” he says.

Niall’s the unlucky bastard that gets stuck in the truck with Louis and Zayn and Liam. Harry gets to ride in Liam’s battered Toyota Land Cruiser all by himself. They make a tiny caravan back on the highway while Liam explains how he’s wound up at the rest of the guys’ pit stop.

“I won’t say that I was tracking you,” says Liam, “but I wasn’t _not_ tracking you.”

“Why?” Niall asks. He thinks he knows, he’d just like to hear it.

“Erm,” Liam says. “I figured I owed you. You know, for,” his face clouds over. “For making such a big mistake. I thought…I was a forest ranger, before. In Zion, in Utah. I wanted to run, and then I busted my leg, and then I wanted to sing, but I wasn’t very good, so I thought, you know, forest ranger. You find people who are lost and rescue them. Nothing wrong with that, was there? And it was less boring than firefighting.

“One of my first few days out, we found a body. Me and my trainer, I mean. Just, awful – you don’t want to know, although I suppose…I suppose you already do, probably. Everybody kept telling me it must’ve been a bobcat or a coyote but that wouldn’t make any sense at all, would it? Eventually, some hunters – er, you know, our kind of hunters – heard me making such a big fuss and let me in on the secret. So. I thought, like. I didn’t know that it was possible to be _that_ and still be,” Liam gestures at Zayn, and Louis, and Niall, “ _this_.”

Niall’s not quite sure what he means; he looks at Zayn and Louis and sees a couple of battle-weary wolves with not near enough troops at their disposal, and entirely too young for this, but. But maybe if he turns his head just the right way, and the early gray predawn light slants across their faces at just the right angle, he can see what Liam means.

Liam clears his throat. “I didn’t know about you. That’s pretty embarrassing now, eh? Werewolves just under my nose and I couldn’t see them. Erm, well. Actually, I sort of figured out Louis. I put a tracker on his truck.”

Louis actually looks affronted. “Figured me out? What the fuck do you mean? I’m such a fucking good wolf. I’m the James Bond of wolves.”

“I overheard you telling someone on the phone that you ‘would sooner eat a raw rabbit than become a vegetarian, and that’s not being a wolf,’” Liam says.

Louis works his jaw. “Very well,” he says. “Fine.”

“And that’s why you’re here?” Zayn asks. “To pay back some debt?”

Liam swallows. Niall watches the way his eyes flick over Zayn’s admittedly beautiful face. Unlike most people, his eyes don’t linger on his cheekbones or his jaw. Liam fixes his eyes on Zayn’s. “Yes,” he answers.

Louis weighs in, “Well, you’re probably going to die, but so are the rest of us. Niall, pass me a Slim Jim, won’t you?”

They park the cars at Gifford Pinchot National Forest just as the sun breaks over the horizon. Niall thinks of the witches’ slowly hatching sun and shivers. Harry offers, “Need your jacket back?” and Niall shakes his head. He stuffs his hands inside his jean pockets and waits outside the outhouse for Zayn to finish using the toilet before he can take his turn.

Louis paid off the park ranger to let them through the gates early, claiming they drove all night just to hike these beautiful mountains. Then he offered him a hundred bucks.

It feels a little like the camping trips Niall’s dad used to take him and Greg on in the sense that it’s just the lot of them, the thick, green trees, and their cars. The engine in Liam’s truck pops as it cools. It doesn’t feel much like those trips in that Niall didn’t fall asleep on the ride here, and his dad didn’t scoop him out of the seat and carry him to the campsite.

“Hey,” Harry says. “We made it, yeah? And Liam’s here to help. The others should be here soon. Maybe if we work together, we can, I don’t know.” He laughs lowly. “One thing at a time, alright?”

“No, I know,” Niall says.

“Then what is it?”

Niall bites the inside of his cheek. He knows he needs to talk to Harry about his sister. Harry’s a born wolf, surely he’ll have some insight into whatever the fuck’s wrong with Niall’s head. But. But nobody was watching in the grocery store, or right now, and even if Harry doesn’t love him or even love him back, they get along, yeah? Niall can’t afford to sacrifice that right now. Not when their survival hinges on it.

And he’s a huge coward. There’s that too.

Harry settles against the railing on the porch in front of the outhouse with his arms folded over his chest, his eyes trained on Niall. So Niall blurts, “I’m from – my nephew is, like. Close.”

“Yeah?” Harry asks. “Are you worried about him?”

“Always,” Niall says. The answer is so obvious it comes out as a disbelieving little laugh. “And just, like. D’you ever wonder if you’re more bad than good for someone?”

At that, Harry cracks a smile. “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve not known you to be bad for anyone,” Harry answers.

The outhouse door opens and Zayn shuffles out. Niall trades a look with Harry that even he can’t decipher, and then he ducks inside for his turn.

They split up to get some rest before night settles in and brings with it a whole new threat. Niall and Harry end up in Liam’s Toyota, while the other guys crash in the Ford. Niall folds his arm under his head in the backseat and stares up at the ceiling. Harry’s right, they have made it this far. That’s something. And if they can secure even a few of the city’s neighborhoods, that’s a good handhold to start expanding boundaries again. Zayn’s never done well too much on his own. Having his pack close to him again will make him feel better.

And Niall…Niall thinks of Theo’s innocent smile, the way he used to pick the red Fruit Loops out of his cereal when he was just a wee thing sat in a high chair, and wants so much more than he’ll ever have.

“I can’t sleep, you’re thinking so loud,” Harry says.

Niall jumps. Then, “Sorry, I’ll – sorry.”

Harry heaves a sigh, and then there’s rustling as he clambers up and over the seat. He lands across Niall’s lap, a little clumsy, but not ungentle.

“What are you doing?” Niall asks. He sounds choked to his own ears.

“Relax,” says Harry. He makes himself comfortable with his knees on either side of Niall’s hips in the narrow backseat. It’s a close fit, but that’s not why Niall’s heart is suddenly racing. “Haven’t you ever had a nice stress relief make-out session with a friend?”

For some reason, Niall’s brain chooses the end of Harry’s sentence to latch onto. “Friends?” he asks. “That’s what we are?”

Harry puts his hands on either side of Niall’s face. Niall surprises even himself and slides one palm up over Harry’s leg. “Yeah,” Harry says, and lowers his face to Niall’s. He’s gentle, almost tentative, at first. The drag of his lips over Niall’s is light as a feather; Niall’s body feels like it’s been electrified.

Niall lifts his head, trying for more, but Harry keeps the touch frustratingly delicate. It feels like the way sun shines through gossamer, and Niall whines without meaning to. He flushes deeply, and Harry’s fingertips press against his cheeks as if to soak it in. “C’mon,” Niall mutters. “S’ not like I’m going to break.”

“Shh,” Harry says, and carries on his maddening attack down Niall’s throat. Niall fists his hands in the oversized hoodie Harry’s wearing. Niall writhes helplessly with every barely-there kiss to the freckles trailing down his throat, but there’s nowhere to go in this cramped backseat, no escape. Every soft press of Harry’s lips against his skin hurts like a bullet wound, but _good_ ; Niall doesn’t ever want it to stop. ‘Cept, “This isn’t –” an embarrassing gasp, “– very stress reliving.”

Harry pauses, his warm breath sparking off the kiss-wet spots on Niall’s skin like matches to a fire. “No,” he says. It might be a question, not that Niall’s particularly capable of answering it right now. Harry lowers his mouth back down to the middle of Niall’s chest, right over his bony sternum and, not at all safe beneath it, his heart.

Warm dawn light gilds Harry’s silhouette and the tips of his long lashes in shades of gold. His tongue is warm and damp even through Niall’s shirt and Niall makes a sound even he didn’t know he could make, a wolf-like growl deep in his throat. He curls his hands so tight in Harry’s – in Niall’s own – hoodie that his fingernails must be leaving little half-moon cuts.

“See?” Harry asks. Niall’s fiercely glad for the minute hitch in Harry’s breathing. At the very least, he’s not as in control as he wants to seem. Harry’s soft, warm mouth lands on the top of Niall’s cheek as lightly as a butterfly. He’s so _close_ now. Niall makes himself wait, though. Wait. Just to show Harry he can make him suffer, too. “Feel better yet?” He places a tender kiss to the corner of Niall’s mouth.

The way Harry’s touching him is enough to drive anyone crazy. Harry nudges the hem of Niall’s shirt up and circles his thumb over the soft skin of Niall’s hip. Niall’s skin is too small and so hot that Harry’s fingerprints must be leaving marks. Even the thud of his heart is slow, slow. It’s not _fair_. “No,” Niall says, just to be difficult.

Harry smiles, and his mouth finally finds Niall’s. He tastes like apples. The slow, slick way his lips move against Niall’s makes Niall feel like Harry’s mapping him out as thoroughly as Niall mapped his and Zayn’s path across three states. It feels like it lasts for hours. The only sound Niall hears is the soft smack of their lips; the only part of him that feels real is the part Harry’s kissing, and Harry’s soft skin under Niall’s fingertips, the back of his hoodie pushed up a few tentative inches to Harry’s encouraging murmurs.

They kiss till Niall’s mouth goes sore. The rest of him feels boneless, weightless and nonessential. “Why do you keep doing that?” he asks Harry, quite without meaning to. Harry’s thumbs brush over Niall’s cheeks again, then again, like he’s not even aware of himself doing it.

When Harry smiles, he looks so young. “You smile,” he answers, his voice touched with laughter. “When we kiss. Wanted to feel it.”

Niall’s been flayed open by silver bullets and clawed to pieces by vampires, and he still feels the most exposed he’s ever been. He kisses Harry with new intent, and Harry kisses back eagerly. The thumb he leaves on Niall’s cheek feels more like a declaration now. A stake.

The heat builds inside of Niall until he feels like he might combust under Harry’s gentle warm weight, and then he’s carefully rolling them over. Harry slots his thigh between Niall’s, and Niall’s heart rate spikes. He can’t quite seem to catch his breath, and the Toyota is positively suffocating: too small, too close.

“Careful,” Harry mumbles lightly against Niall’s mouth. “Watch the claws, babe.”

Niall goes absolutely still, torn between horror and wanting to die of embarrassment. He feels poised on the edge of a moment and unsure what to do next, whether to take a bite out of Harry or set himself on fire by the heat of his own skin. It’s the ache in his jaw that makes Niall hastily pull away, his skin absolutely scalding. He can hear the frown in Harry’s voice, though he can’t look at him. “Whoa, hey. Wait.”

“Sorry,” Niall blurts. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have, I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” Harry says again. His heart’s still beating along at the same slow, unafraid pace. “It’s not your fault, okay? It happens to all of us. It’s not your fault.”

“Doesn’t happen to you,” Niall mumbles. He wonders how much longer he can stare at the cracked speedometer on the dashboard before he has the way it looks memorized for the rest of his life.

Harry shrugs and answers, “Practice.” He looks a mess in the backseat of Liam’s shitty SUV. His lips are red and swollen, and his hair looks like a bird’s been living it. A rosy flush makes his eyes look too green. Niall’s heart aches. “C’mon,” Harry says. “It’s late. We should get some sleep.”

“I…”

“C’mon,” Harry says again. He pulls lightly on Niall’s shirt, so Niall gives in, slowly. He leaves Harry plenty of time to change his mind, as any sane person would. Maybe Harry’s not sane. He pulls Niall back down over him like a warm blanket until Niall’s laying with his ear over Harry’s steady heart. Niall doesn’t realize how tense he is until Harry smooths a palm down his back. Not pushing him away. Making him comfortable.

“I’m tired,” Niall mumbles. He feels like it ought to be a warning. Sometimes he shifts in his sleep, and sometimes he has nightmares that he’s starting to think come true, or will, or have before.

“You should sleep.”

There’s still so much Niall ought to say. But Harry’s right. He’s tired. And there’s still tomorrow. There’s fewer tomorrows than yesterday, but there’s still tomorrow. Niall yawns. He’s asleep in mere minutes.

***

Niall wakes up deep in the dark forest. His breath leaves him in a fine puff of condensation and he can smell himself, unclean fur and sweat and the coppery scent of blood. He’s not sure if it’s his own, or someone else’s.

Silvery moonlight filters through breaks in the trees like gauze. The woods, black and stark and very deep, hum quietly with the breath of a thousand living things: cicadas chirping in the trees, snakes slithering in the underbrush, owls hooting softly _Who? Who?_ and the soft creaks and groans of branches stretching under their own weight. 

There’s also Harry’s sister. The silver spills over the top of her silver-gray hair like a liquid thing, as though she’s a part of it. It makes Niall’s stomach tense up and curl; he doesn’t realize for ages that he thinks she’s beautiful. That she looks like Harry.

“I thought you were dead,” he tries to say. But his mouth is a wolf’s, and right now, Niall’s not even in the driver’s seat. The wolf slinks closer, his body pressed low to the ground, his hackles raised while an eerie grow rumbles around his chest like a bird’s cry in an empty sky. There’s something off about it.

“Run,” Niall tries to say next, but she’s already tried that. And look at where they are. Niall swallows hard, though it feels like maybe he’s not really done it, that it’s just the little scraps of himself squirreled away in the back of the wolf’s mind. The wolf’s eerie growl peters out, and in its place is just the too-loud quiet of the forest at nighttime.

“What?” the girl finally asks. She rakes her fingers through her hair, which is matted with blood and dirt, like this isn’t the first time she’s been run to ground tonight. “ _Run!_ ” Niall tries again, louder, with everything he’s got. No sound leaves the wolf’s throat, and the girl Niall thinks must be Harry’s sister just stares defiantly into its face.

He can smell the fear in her sweat and her blood. The expression on her face keeps seesawing between fierce defiance and fear edged with panic. Niall understands. A less brave person would probably have already started screaming.

Niall’s chest squeezes, and then he hears himself make a noise like a dog’s woeful “Awoo,” that doesn’t make any sense. He’s not a dog, and he doesn’t need the wolf’s jaw to make speech, he can be human. The wolf goes on making these almost-speech noises that slither under Niall’s skin through his ears and twist inside of him, sharp and brittle and cold. He wants to press the heels of his hands against his eyes and scream, and he wants to shift to get them out, but he can’t.

He’s. He’s stuck like this. Just here for the ride. Trapped.

The girl’s mouth curls at the corner. “You’re as scared as I am, aren’t you.” It doesn’t sound like a question. She tilts her jaw up, swallowing hard. “You can kill me, and it won’t change anything. You don’t know it, but you’re already dead, too.”

The wolf’s ears flatten against its head and it creeps closer, baring its teeth.

The girl presses her back against the tree, her eyes locked onto the wolf’s snout. When she speaks, her voice doesn’t waver. “So you can tell Ben,” she says, the same flinty note of courage in her voice that Niall’s heard Harry use, “that the harder he tries, the sooner the end will come. I’ve seen it myself.”

She sags against the tree behind her like someone’s just unplugged her power cord. Niall strains to do something, _anything,_ but he’s strapped into the passenger seat and nobody can hear him screaming. Finally, belatedly, Niall can smell the blood pumping smoothly and evenly out of her from ten different spots. Somehow, Niall knows that he wasn’t the only person pursuing her, that he was just the one that caught her.

He raises his hackles and gives that low, empty rumbling growl again. His chest aches with it. Niall slaps his palms over his ears, but he can’t tear his eyes away. He knows what happens next, and he would do anything to avoid it. But he figures he owes it to her. This girl who’s trying to stop him. Maybe he can get some tips. Or maybe it’s just that she deserves someone who will remember how she died.

“You think he’ll be proud of you,” she murmurs. She’s almost limp against the tree now, Niall sees, and her hands are still and white in her lap. Not fighting anymore. Somehow, that seems the worst part. She’s accepted her fate. “You’re the wolf that killed Gemma Styles.”

Niall’s heart sinks right through his stomach, past his feet, too far deep down for him to reach. He tells himself to shift, to stop this. He can’t make the shift happen. He can’t do anything. _Harry,_ he thinks, and could cry for him.

“Hah,” Gemma says, smiling faintly now, not afraid at all. “No, you haven’t. I’m going to haunt you forever.”

The wolf surges forward. Its cruel teeth sink through her soft throat like a knife through butter. Any scream she’d have made dies in her throat before it ever leaves her mouth. The wolf bites again, and again, and again, Niall stuck in horrified fascination, his stomach so twisted around that he doesn’t think it’ll ever go back to the way it was. The wolf steps back only once the inhuman surge of brutality has passed. Gemma’s face is still a beautiful thing, especially with moonlight falling over her forehead and nose and chin like silver water.

The wolf throws back its head and howls.

Niall wakes up screaming.

***

Space. Niall needs room to breath, he can’t draw a breath as a prisoner inside this wolf anymore, he’s going to suffocate, he’ll die in here and then – maybe that’d be better, but there’s no hope that he can ever reclaim control. God. Jesus. Does he even want that? Oh, God, Gemma. He killed Gemma.

Niall’s fingers catch on the door handle and he spills onto the ground. The shift roils over him like a protective casing but Niall doesn’t ever want to be a wolf again, not like that, not knowing what’ll happen to him. He wants to stay human. He wants to be human. He wants to go back.

“Niall!” Niall can’t even tell who’s said his name, but that’s right – that’s who he is. He presses his face against something hard and gritty and tells himself to breathe, but he can still taste Gemma’s blood on his tongue, hear the last, faint beats of her heart, and his lungs don’t work.

“Niall,” someone says again, this time much closer. It has traces of the alpha’s power in it, and Niall curls into a ball, his fingers curled into tight fists. He tucks his claws away and locks his knees against his chest. His heart beats a wild rhythm inside his chest, and if his eyes weren’t squeezed shut, Niall figures he’d probably be seeing spots by now. “Niall.”

A hand comes down on his shoulder, so gentle that Niall could cry. A jagged sob is torn out of his chest like a tree by the roots in a hurricane. “Breathe, Niall,” Harry says. It’s his voice that has the last of Niall’s control slipping away. That flinty note of courage; he sounds just like his sister. Niall almost wouldn’t believe that he’s making those awful, awful sobbing noises but for the fact he can feel them in his throat. His cheeks are wet and cold in the cool air.

Harry wraps his arms around Niall and tucks Niall’s face into his throat, but it’s too much like what Niall’s just seen, just _done,_ and he pushes Harry away. “What?” Harry asks. He sounds desperate and concerned and pained and Niall doesn’t deserve a minute of it. “What is it, Niall?” He reaches out, tentatively, and smooths his thumb over Niall’s cheek.

“I,” Niall starts, swallows. He knows there’s no way this ends well. He can see it already, feel it, just like Gemma said; he knows how this plays out. Not even Harry could forgive the person who killed his sister, and Niall can’t lie. He’d be like the tree uprooted in a hurricane, but the tree is himself. And that’s already slipping away from him. “Gemma, she, I – I…” Niall swallows. “Harry. Harry, I’m so sorry.”

Harry’s hand drops away from Niall’s cheek. He’s kneeling beside Niall, dirtying his knees on the blacktop parking lot, his lips still sore-looking from all that time they spent kissing. Dawn light makes him look both younger and older, casting his features in threads of gold light and drawing out the fatigue of years of this life. “What do you mean,” he asks. “Sorry, why are you sorry?”

Niall listens to his breath rattling around his chest. If he tells Harry, Harry will never forgive him. If he doesn’t, he’ll never forgive himself.

“Hey,” Liam says. He’s stood outside the outhouse. His face is still pale and puffy with sleep, and he looks unbelievably fragile without a shirt on, his hair listing tiredly to one side. “Good morning. What are you…doing?”

Niall manages to make himself sit up. He wipes at his face, stuffing the hitching little sobs in the same place where he keeps the wolf. “Nothing,” he says. “Had a bad dream, is all. It’s fine.”

“Oh.” Liam rocks back and forth on his heels, his lower lip caught between his teeth. “Sorry, then I’ll just,” he points at the Toyota, then himself, his cheeks reddening. “Right, yeah. Okay.”

Niall can feel Harry’s gaze on him like a physical weight, but he can’t bring himself to meet his eyes. That doesn’t stop Harry from putting a hand on Niall’s shoulder, his thumb on the dimple in the middle of Niall’s chin. “You can tell me,” Harry says earnestly. “Okay. We’re friends, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Niall says. It comes out of him sounding like a dry sob. He clears his throat. “I know.”

They break camp just half an hour later. Harry drives the Toyota, still with Zayn snoring in the backseat, while Louis and Liam share the Ford. Niall can see them in the rearview mirror; they’re laughing about something, and every once in a while their mouths move the same way, like they’re singing along to the radio. Niall cups his chin in his palm and watches trees stream past the window like he’s a wolf running full out, and he doesn’t know what to do.

“What are we going to do when we get to town?” Harry asks, seemingly reading his mind.

“What do you mean?” Niall asks, on edge.

“I mean, us,” Harry says, with a comprehensive wave at him and Niall and Zayn snoozing and the boys in the other truck blasting Springsteen so loud Niall can hear the Boss from here. “You think we ought to just wave and smile and say goodbye?”

Niall shrugs uneasily. He’s feeling so many things at the same time he doesn’t know what to do with any of it. Part of him is intensely glad that he gets these last few hours with Harry humming along softly to the radio, his wayward pinky brushing Niall’s leg every time Harry has to switch gears.

Part of him doesn’t want to ever see Harry again, because if they leave like this, then it’s on good terms, practically, and he’ll know that Harry will remember him if not fondly then without malice, and Niall will have that, at least. He wants fiercely to protect Zayn, and Theo, and the rest of his pack. He’s lost too many friends as it is not to know that they alone don’t stand a chance, though. Not unless Zayn can find them someplace safe to be, to reconvene his pack and give them each other. Niall’s not sure that even that will be enough.

Mostly, Niall wants a different life. He could be a college student on a road trip with his not-pretend boyfriend and his best friend in the backseat. He wouldn’t be afraid for his life, or theirs, or his humanity. Niall wonders when his biggest fantasies became ordinary things.

“I don’t know,” Niall says. “I’m just Zayn’s beta. Just – tell me what to do.”

“Niall,” Harry says. He doesn’t mess it up the way most people do, flattening the vowels into something that sounds more like Nile. “C’mon, bro. I know something is bothering you.” He glances into the rearview mirror, but Zayn’s still snoring in the backseat. Harry lowers his voice anyway. “You woke up crying my sister’s name. C’mon. Talk to me.”

Niall tenses up. “I can’t,” he offers, and snaps his mouth shut a beat too late. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have said anything.

 _It’s not your fault,_ he remembers Harry saying, when the claws came out when they weren’t meant to. _It happens to all of us._

“Just,” Niall licks his lips. “I don’t know. You were born like this, yeah? A wolf? What was that like?”

Harry glances sideways at him. “Not so different, I don’t think. I didn’t start shifting till high school anyway, because of, like, puberty. You know when they say you’ll start growing hair in new places, I guess they don’t normally mean all over.” He nudges Niall with his elbow, flashing him a smile over the console, and Niall wants. “But my sister, Gemma, she went through it a few years before, so I sort of knew what to expect. Still almost crapped myself on my first shift though, when I couldn’t figure out how to shift back. But she was there. I got back.”

Niall nods slowly. “Was it your mom or your dad who…?”

“Mom,” Harry answers easily. “She was one hell of an alpha, too. Although if you ask me, I think all moms have a touch of that. Magic. What about you, what’s your mom like?”

“I don’t know,” Niall answers. “She, er. She died having me. Then dad died a few years later. It was me and my brother for a long time.”

“What happened to him?” Harry asks, his voice gentle.

Niall furrows his brow. “I don’t know,” he admits. He always thought not knowing was the worst thing, but now that he has Harry’s sister’s blood so fresh on his hands – and God, here Harry is carrying on a sweet little chat with him, being a good person, and Niall killed his goddamn sister – but maybe not knowing isn’t the worst thing. Maybe having no hope is. “He – he had it rough, taking care of me, and then having a baby on top of that. He worked a lot. One day he just…didn’t come home.”

Niall leaves out the part where he would go days without seeing his brother but waking up to a handful of twenties pushed through the slat in the door to get him and Theo through the next few days, the building sense of anxiety as days passed and Niall rode around the bus with a baby strapped to his chest looking for him on street corners and down narrow alleys.

He leaves out the part where they grew up together, first Greg playing in Little League games that Niall watched from his stroller and later played in himself with Greg in the stands, cheering him on. He doesn’t mention the movies they’d watch on the couch together that were a little too scary for either of them, but fun all the same, or how as often as Niall fell asleep on his own he’d wake up with Greg halfway to shoving him out of bed.

Some things, Niall thinks, just don’t have to be said. He figures Harry must know it, anyway.

“I thought, like, maybe he was in deep with someone, or he was hurt, so I went looking for him. We had this fort in the woods behind our house, so I left Theo with my physics teacher, Mr. Breslin – Bressie – and went looking for him. Got bit, instead.” Niall huffs out a laugh. “And here we are.”

“Jesus,” Harry says. “You’re, like, tough.” He laughs a little. “That’s an understatement. I mean, you’re tough as hell.”

“Nah,” Niall says. He wishes that he could believe Harry, that he could be the person he thinks Harry sees him as. He feels like a stronger, better version of himself in Harry’s eyes.

Harry clears his throat. “And that’s how you met my sister?” He’s pressing gently, but Niall suddenly feels sick with his own stupidity, a ridiculous sense of betrayal. Of course Harry was asking for his own reasons. Niall doesn’t even blame him, it’s just that – oh, he can’t even complain. He tenses without meaning to.

“Harry,” Niall says. A tiny, fragile bubble of hope rises in his chest. Maybe. Maybe it was just a nightmare, like anyone could have. “She – you said she died. How’d she…” He swallows. “How?”

Harry presses his lips together. The miles spin by underneath their wheels with inexorable speed. Niall has the feeling that even if he tried to stop them now, turn back, he wouldn’t be able to. Whatever’s happening, it’s in motion, and there’s no changing it. “Wolf,” Harry answers shortly. “I’ve been trying to figure it out since it happened. One day I shifted, and she wasn’t there anymore, inside my head. Tracked her scent. Tracked the wolf that got her, after, but I lost the trail. Been trying to pick to pick it back up ever since.”

Harry’s fingers tighten around the steering wheel, his face set in a grim line. In the car behind, Niall can see Liam and Louis talking animatedly about something. It feels more than a world away from this tense, quiet car, where Zayn’s sleeping in the backseat and Niall and Harry are edging toward the edge of the known world in the front.

Niall used to love reading about maps and he always particularly loved mappaemundi, maps with the whole known world drawn out and connected together with dragons in places no one’s ever been. Niall can almost hear the dragon, he’s so close. “Her hair was silver,” Niall says.

Harry whips him a sharp look. “Blue,” he answers, his voice catching. “Niall. Are you,” he pauses. Niall can hear his pulse jackrabbiting in his chest. He doesn’t have to know Harry all that well to know that he’s probably trembling not just with shock but with anger, as well. “C’mon,” Harry says again, weakly. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I couldn’t control it,” Niall answers, very softly. “In the beginning. I don’t. I don’t remember a whole lot of it.” In truth, he felt then much the way he feels now. Out of control, at least until he met Zayn and joined his pack, and Niall learned how to hold on tight.

Harry doesn’t say anything else to him the rest of the ride. When they reach the city limits, they pull into a rest stop. Zayn jostles awake when his head knocks against the window. He blinks sleepily, and then it’s like the mood in the car penetrates his brain, because his eyebrows go up. “You two alright?”

“Fine,” Harry answers.

It’s no surprise when they’re all out of their vehicles and gathered in a loose circle that Harry suggests they split up.

“What about him?” Louis asks, with a nod toward Niall.

Harry’s nose crinkles like he smells something particularly foul. It’s not a struggle to look as pathetic as Niall feels right now. He shouldn’t have told Harry, he knows that. He and Zayn still need all the backup they can find; it’d make sense to keep up his act with Harry, keep the two packs together. It’s just that Niall has so little of himself left that he has to cling to what he hasn’t yet lost.

Niall shivers in his jean jacket. Harry’s still wearing Niall’s gray hoodie, and it makes Niall’s stomach cramp hard, how close he got to almost having what he wanted. “He’s right,” Niall says. “We’d end up fighting over the same territory anyway. Might as well split up now.”

“Oh.” Niall wonders if he’s imagining the note of…disappointment? In Louis’s voice. “Alright. Well, I’d say call us sometime, but,” he smiles weakly. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

“Looking forward to it,” Zayn says, his voice only the tiniest bit dry.

And that’s the end of it. Niall and Zayn get into Liam’s rumbling Ford and Liam drives them into the city. Niall rests his head against the window and closes his eyes, and tries not to dream. 

***

Liam’s car runs out of gas in Green Lake. He pulls it over, limping, to the side of the road. They have eighteen dollars between them, enough for half a tank of gas or some food. They decide on food.

Niall and Zayn have been living on the edge of starvation and homelessness for long enough now that they have a system intact for surviving on a nonexistent budget. Parks are nicer to sleep in than the space underneath an overpass, but overpasses are generally safer; people are more likely to ignore you altogether if you’re face isn’t smudged with dirt, which they’ve used to their benefit; and the cheapest food is usually tied into something else.

They pay four bucks each to get into a bowling alley two blocks away from where they ditched the truck. The bowling alley sells burgers and corn dogs and baskets of fries for one dollar each. It doubles as an okay place to hang out and consider what they should do next, as well.

Niall props his chin up in his hand and swirls his soggy fry around the ketchup he squirted into the greasy paper basket and tells himself that it could’ve been worse. Harry could’ve tried to kill him, or called him any number of things, honestly. Somehow the fact that he just stopped caring altogether like a switch going off feels worse than either of those might. Probably because he never really cared at all.

“I’m kinda,” Liam ventures, “I suppose I’m a little surprised, actually, that you split up.”

“We,” Zayn corrects him gently. Two lanes over, a family with a little girl throws a bowling ball at the pins and the pins scatter. They whoop and heft the little girl onto the dad’s shoulders. Her laughter sounds like the chime of a bell, it’s so sweet.

“I’m not in your pack,” Liam says, though his cheeks have reddened.

Zayn shakes his head. “You came back. You’re here.”

Niall finally snaps. “Christ, can you two suck face in the bathroom like a couple of normal dudes? I’m trying to eat here.”

“No, you’re not, you’re fucking playing with your food,” Zayn spits back. “Asshole. You didn’t hear us telling you shit when you smelled as much like Harry as he does.”

“It was fake!” Niall says, because apparently he’s telling the truth today. He thinks he should probably have more days like this, except in his experience, telling the truth just hurts more than it helps. He can tell instantly that this is one of those situations. “I mean, it wasn’t. It was,” he scrambles for an explanation that won’t have Zayn pulling away from him, as well.

Maybe you can be such an awful person that nobody wants to be around you, let alone love you, and then how can you be human anyway? Niall hears himself say, “Not like that. Just, we wanted you to, like, cooperate, and we thought.” Niall’s eyes are burning again. “Sorry,” he says, his voice cracking halfway through. “God, I’m so sorry.”

To Niall’s eternal surprise, Zayn reaches out and puts his hand on Niall’s forearm. “Idiot,” he says, his voice warm. “I know. You’re a shit liar.”

“I did something awful,” Niall confesses. The bowling alley is dark and loud with bowling balls knocking over pins and people celebrating or lamenting their tosses, and food sizzling in oil in the tiny kitchen, and Queen playing over the crackling stereo. Niall’s glad that Zayn and Liam can’t see his face very well, or hear his voice.

“Yeah,” Liam says. His eyes crinkle up when he smiles. “Same as the rest of us.”

Niall shakes his head, his stomach heaving. He can’t believe Zayn hasn’t already lunged across the table to kill him. He can’t believe he could be quite so lucky to have Zayn in his corner, and Liam. He remembers the last pack he and Zayn cleared out of Zayn’s newly claimed territory, and Zayn warning them to turn tail. They took a bat to Niall’s knee, instead, so Zayn ripped them apart. That’s the thing about loving someone, though. At a certain point you stop caring if they’re good or bad, or even right or wrong. You love them whether or no.

“You want to find them?” Niall asks. He thinks approaching Harry again might be more selfish than anything. He also thinks that everybody’s entitled to one really selfish act before they die, and maybe this is his. The rest of his life he’ll be really, properly good, as good as he can be, but for right now, he wants to explain. To tell Harry that’s not who he is, or at the very least not who he wanted to be. He wants to be the person Harry thought he was before Niall went and fucked it all up.

Zayn shells out the last of their cash for tip. Then he pushes his chair out from the table and rises to his full height. He’s not very tall, or very big. He looks more like a pack leader now than ever, though. “I’m never gonna be that, like, guy,” he says. It feels like maybe he wants Liam to hear this as much as Niall, and Niall as much as Liam. They’re the only people he’s got. These are the only people Niall has, too, really. It’s a strange feeling to acknowledge it; even stranger to have it acknowledged. “The one with the great speech, or whatever. All’s I know is this. I’d be a hell of a lot happier going down fighting this shitbox other pack than Louis’s. How’s that for a motivational speech?”

Liam laughs and stands up, too; he drags Niall with him. “To protecting people,” Liam revises, “and each other.”

“Yeah,” Zayn says. “Isn’t that what I said?”

They toss the last of their food and the greasy paper linings into the trash and leave the plastic baskets in the rack on top of the trash can. Niall leads the way out of the bowling alley; he’s pretending not to see Zayn and Liam’s hands brush behind him, and the way they’re both trying not to smile. It’s a little gross, really. He hits the heavy exit door and pushes it open and steps out into dazzlingly bright sunshine.

The pain hits him like a migraine tied to the front of a speeding train. Niall staggers back, winded by it; he can make out flashes of a city street, an empty bench, the creak of a rusted metal awning sagging under the weight of a sign. And just as soon as it started, the pain stops.

“Niall?” Zayn asks. He sounds very far away. “Are you alright?”

It’s the other wolf, Niall knows it is. The one from the forest the day Deo died. The rhythm of his paws on the forest floor is unmistakable, though this time it doesn’t feel so much like rich soil and grass underfoot.

Not even a feral wolf would dare bursting into the city in the shift, it’d have to be entirely mad. Wait, no. Wait. It feels different, this time. More like he’s hearing what the other wolf is hearing. Like the footsteps are pounding in his mind through the shift, a net closing in. “Shit,” Niall gets out.

“What’s – what’s wrong with him?” Liam asks. Zayn’s skinny arm circles Niall’s shoulders.

He can hear more than see Zayn’s frown. “Dunno,” Zayn answers. “But it’s been happening a lot.”

“We gotta –” Niall retches against the pain, his stomach full of fries and corndogs about to turn itself inside out, and says, “We gotta get out of here.”

Using civilians – nonmagical people – as a line of defense is always a risk. There’s a chance that yeah, whatever’s chasing them will be discouraged. There’s also a chance they’ll shift, and then their only way of detecting someone before they get a knife in their guts is by scent. And not all wolves smell much like wolf.

So they run. 

“How do you know,” Liam pants as they cut down 70th toward downtown, “that they know where we are?”

It’s a good question. Niall thinks about it while he pumps his legs and narrowly avoids pedestrians pushing strollers down the street and carrying shopping bags and walking their yappy little dogs on leashes, all of them dressed like truly Seattle hipsters. It makes something settle inside of him despite the circumstances that nothing has truly changed while he’s been gone.

Maybe one of their own leaked their location, although that’d be awful to do, since literally only the three of them knew where they were. Maybe someone’s been tracking them, though, following. But for what purpose? They’re no use to anyone alive; they’ve been thinking someone wants them dead. Niall’s mind speeds over the puzzle again and again like he’s turning back to a crossword puzzle hint, “ _Eight letter word for what should be_ ,” but he still can’t think of the answer.

No. That’s not true, Niall thinks. They cut past a little park with just enough space for one of them to sprint across it in a handful of seconds – not space enough – and Niall thinks, they’re being hunted. They’re used to being on top of the food chain. Turns out they’re not at that point anymore.

Niall says as much to Zayn, who’s already started sweating. They’re in much better shape as wolves than as humans, and Niall can feel the itch under Zayn’s skin to dive into the shift and let himself off the leash. Niall’s not sure he can even do it, at this point. He’s a little afraid to find out.

“We need space,” is all Zayn says.

“Marymoor Park is just up the way,” Niall says, dodging around a little yellow car whose breaks squeak to a stop and blast the horn; Zayn jogs in front of it like he’s riding a cloud, and Liam slides over the top like a cop from an eighties buddy movie. Niall snorts despite himself. Typical.

Niall hears the park sooner than he can see it; he’s been under too many overpasses not to remember the rushing scream of traffic as it barrels down the highway, but the 520 has its own special sound. In spite of all the effort Niall’s put in to stay away, it sounds like cars rushing home.

Zayn and Niall hurl themselves at the wrought iron fence surrounding the park and start scaling it with the ease of long practice; Liam’s just a moment behind, his “Oh, for Christ,” swallowed up by the pounding inside Niall’s heart. They come down on the other side to squelching grass and the barking of a large dog, whose owner wanders up moments later, when they’re already gone.

The park smells like wet grass and dog shit and one of the last remaining open spaces in Seattle; it smells like too many hours Niall spent here and at Lake Sammamish at the southern edge of the park, first dipping his toes in the water and then later shucking his jeans and shirt and going for a swim, playing with his brother and later his friends. It feels an awful lot like his childhood.

“Where to?” Zayn asks, looking to him. “And have you got anything left?” he asks Liam.

Liam shakes his head morosely. “No. Spent the last of what I had on the truck. I’ve got a couple of knives and a grenade, though.”

“Save the grenade,” Niall says, before Zayn can get any funny ideas. “This way.”

Niall remembers this from years and years of wanting to tackle it, although he always thought his skinny arms and legs couldn’t hold him up. The thing is, after the terrifying first few shifts, there was a golden period where Niall loved being a wolf. Suddenly he was all the things he wasn’t before: fast and sure and strong, something instinctual and not so self-doubting and tough. The wolf didn’t chew its nails to bits or keep itself up for hours and hours at night thinking about all the horrible things that might be happening to Greg, or could happen to Theo. The wolf just _did._ Being afraid of it came later; for a while, before he knew the real price of it, he felt powerful.

The Pinnacle is still wrapped in a low fence. Nobody’s trying to climb the rock wall in the middle of the day on a weekday – is it a weekday? What day is it? – which is convenient.

“Wait,” Zayn says, slowing up, while Niall and Liam start hauling themselves up handholds and footholds, “we could be trapped up there.”

Niall’s claustrophobia trickles into his consciousness in the middle of an open park. “Trust me,” is all he says.

It happens to be the wrong thing to say. Niall’s halfway up, stretching for the next handhold, and pain whiplashes across his mind like a lightning bolt. It brings with it a dazzling flash of imagery: a shadowed forest, the wolf’s forepaws laid out in front of it, and the pounding feet and lolling tongues of wolves on the chase, their paws tearing up soft grass, now. Close. Closing in.

Niall lets go of his handholds and falls backward in what feels like slow motion, still struggling to process the nonstop flood of stimulus: the phantom taste of fresh meat on his tongue, a breeze moaning through the trees, a smell like blood left to sit out in the sun for days on end, and beneath it all, an unnamed reflex.

He thinks Liam and Zayn must make a grab for him, but miss; hitting the ground and having the breath knocked out of him does nothing for the vision swimming across Niall’s mind’s eye. For an eternal, frightening moment, he thinks he’s gone. It’s happened. He’s lost himself, just like in the dreams he’s not so sure are dreams anymore, and all is to be lost.

Then the vision recedes, though the feeling doesn’t, not entirely. Niall curls onto his side and tries to catch his breath, tries to stop the tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. It’s silly to mourn it, not when it’s already so late. He should be trying to save what he can.

That’s when the other wolves touch down around them.

Zayn lands in front of Niall with a growl so fierce and familiar that Niall’s hardly thinking before he’s pushing himself back to his feet. His balance swings wildly, and Niall touches his ear curiously to find blood dripping down. He wonders, idly, how that happened. A sandy-colored wolf, a gray one, a black not as pure as Zayn’s fur close in, their hackles raised. They’re making such a scene in broad daylight, Niall thinks. They must _really_ want he and Zayn dead. And why? They can’t possibly pose a legitimate threat right now.

Well. Right now.

Niall dives into the shift like he’s running scared, and maybe he is. He can feel something’s adrift immediately, but can’t name quite what. Instead, Zayn’s voice fills the echoing space inside Niall’s head, and he leans into it gratefully. He’s dimly aware of Liam climbing down behind him, Liam and the snick of his blade and his trembling breath, his heart pounding. His eyes are locked on Zayn, though. Not on anybody else.

To be fair, it is probably a bit weird when the boy you like can turn into an animal.

Zayn sends a question like scales, _What have you got?_

And Niall sends up a warbling little note. _Everything._

They target the same wolf without having to talk about it. The sandy-colored one is the smallest and the fastest, which makes it potentially the most dangerous.

The other wolves don’t jump to her defense, which is strange. It’s pack instinct to save each other, why aren’t they trying? The wolves hesitate, watching Zayn close his jaws around Sandy’s knobbly foot, and then one surges forward.

It’s the opportunity Niall’s been waiting for. He feints the wolf, dodges around it, and goes for the latest one. His jaws are closing around the other wolf’s throat before memory kicks in, and he remembers Gemma’s warm blood gushing into his mouth, the disappointment and fear on Harry’s face when he asked Niall if he – if he was the person he thought he was. It’s memory. Instinct. Niall sinks his fangs in and bites, feeling the soft flesh give way under the force of his jaws.

He turns, a red haze glazing over his vision, and spots the gray wolf. Niall’s normally not the one to attack first. It’s almost always Zayn luring a target in and Niall pouncing from the side, knocking it off kilter while Zayn makes the precise moves. The blood on his tongue tastes coppery and savory; it makes Niall want to cry. He coils to spring at the last wolf and Sandy snipes him from behind, her short, sharp fangs cutting into his flank. Niall hits the ground hard, and pauses. He doesn’t want to make a go at her pulsing throat, too. He doesn’t want to fight anymore.

His split second of hesitation is what costs them. Niall hesitates, so Zayn moves over to save him, and the not-quite-as-black wolf goes for Liam. _To protecting people,_ Niall hears him say, _and each other._ Zayn and the sandy-colored wolf go tumbling, so Niall collects his feet under him and springs for the black wolf like he’s never heard of gravity. Zayn’s just a moment behind, the sandy-colored wolf bleeding all over the grass in Marymoor Park.

The gray wolf has already shifted back to human. The human world will think nothing of gang-on-gang violence. The moment’s already mapped out, even though it isn’t finished yet. Niall grabs the nearest bit of black wolf within reach and bites, takes his teeth out, bites again. And again. He can see the edge of Liam’s tanned skin and the familiar twisting pattern of his tattoos on his arms, and he only hopes it’s not too late.

Zayn drags the black wolf, Niall still attached, away from Liam. He shivers back into human form and dispatches the wolf quickly with his pocket knife. In that moment, even Niall is a little afraid of him.

Liam sits up slowly. The distinct four-fingered claw mark of a wolf stretches across his muscled chest. Blood stains the front of his white t-shirt like a teastain on a white napkin. “Am I a wolf now?” he asks, a lopsided smile curling up one corner of his mouth.

Zayn’s not the only one that tackles him in a hug.

They clean up in a public toilet on park premises. Zayn dabs at the claw marks on Liam’s chest and Liam frets about the wolves they killed. Niall leans against the door they’ve locked behind them, sorry gents closed for repairs, and can’t tell if he wants to cry from relief or anxiety.

“I’m not really a wolf, am I?” Liam asks. Then, “You shift back when you die, is that it?”  

“Course not,” Zayn answers. He’s chosen to be huffy in order to hide his relief. Honestly, his emotional boner for Liam is obvious from across a room. Why he pretends otherwise is beyond Niall. “And yeah. Fear, like. And exhaustion. Injury. Takes the wolf away.”

“Why is that, do you think?” Liam muses.

Niall pipes up, “My physics teacher thinks it’s because, like, being the wolf takes energy. We can’t shift if we’re depleted.”

“Your physics teacher,” Liam repeats in the driest tone he can muster.

Niall nods. “Bressie.”

Zayn turns to shoot Niall a look. “You been talking to him recently?”

“Course not,” Niall echoes.

Of course not. He’s not so cruel as to bother Bressie, or Theo, with him when he can’t be around. He doesn’t want to haunt them before he’s even dead. Niall knows what it’s like to wait for someone to come home who never comes home. He doesn’t want to do that to Theo.

“Hm,” Zayn just hums.

Liam’s chest is mostly clean, but his shirt is ruined. Zayn takes off the flannel shirt tied around his waist and gives it to Liam, who puts it on and buttons it up to the top. It makes Zayn smile helplessly. He puts his hand over Liam’s heart so gently that Niall wants to look away. It’s funny how you learn to appreciate the little things. Your best friend gives you a look only you could interpret, the pepperonis from AstroPizza are deliciously creepy, and the boy you like doesn’t run screaming when you turn into a massive, bloodthirsty dog to protect him. Liam smiles so that his whole face goes soft and tender.

“You should go home,” Zayn says. “To your mom, and your sisters.”

Niall knows he’s not imagining the hurt in his face. “What?”

“You’re getting hurt here,” Zayn answers. “You could’ve been hurt worse.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Liam says. He’s here to repay a debt, Niall thinks, and wonders how he didn’t know it was a lie sooner. He’s here for one reason, and it’s the boy in front of him, smelling like home.

Zayn shakes his head. “I’ll find you, when this is over. When you’re safe. I’ll come find you.”

Liam puts his hand over Zayn’s on his chest. “You protected me,” he says, his voice unutterably soft. “I’ll protect you.” He carefully lifts Zayn’s hand to his mouth and kisses his knuckles, then his fingertips, where the claws sprout out. Niall wants to look away, but he can’t. He feels. He’s just glad, honestly, for moments like these. The world can end, but people go on loving each other just the same. “We stay together,” Liam says.

Zayn grabs Niall on their way out, Niall’s chin tucked to his chest to give the illusion that they had any privacy even though he’d surely have seen the whole scene in Zayn’s memories the very next time he shifted. And the time after that. “He stays, we’re getting backup,” Zayn says. His eyes are dark and wide and intent. The sun is starting to set over the highway overpass and the treetops. The end of another day, the start of another night. Niall feels like he’s been waiting for it forever.

“Okay,” Niall answers cleverly.

“No,” Zayn says. “I mean, we’re finding Louis and Harry, and we’re ripping the throat out of whatever’s trying to kill us. Understood?”

Niall nods slowly. “Yes,” he says.

There’s not going to be any more running away. Zayn intends to fight to the death here. The sun edges beneath the horizon, and a long way off, a wolf howls. _Finally_ , Niall thinks.

***

They wait for full darkness to settle in before crossing the 520 and heading for Redmond Town Center. Niall and Zayn have a few simple, fallback methods for stealing cash when they really need it. One is winning pool; it’s fun, but often time-consuming, so they revert to the simplest. Niall strikes up a cheery conversation with every well-to-do looking man he sees at the shopping center about the Redskins game he definitely didn’t watch, and Zayn slips his fingers into their pockets to fleece their wallets. They always go for the rich-looking ones because they seem the ones most likely to have money to steal, and because they probably won’t actually go hungry without twenty bucks. Niall’s been at the mercy of the emergency five-dollar bill he keeps in the bottom of his shoe too many times not to be careful, if he can.

Liam watches them interestedly, and disapprovingly. “I thought you were supernatural creatures,” is all he offers, when Zayn and Niall resurface from the teeming crowd outside a bar with seventy-four dollars cobbled together. “Not pickpockets.”

“Men of many hats,” Zayn says drily. “Now. Buy yourself some guns.”

Liam doesn’t really complain after that.

They also buy a disposable phone from a street vendor who keeps a wary eye on them like he knows better. Niall makes it a point to keep his hands in his pockets. He even whistles a few short, sweet notes before he gets too sharp a look and gives it up.

“Just so you know,” Liam volunteers, while Zayn struggles to dial the number Louis left him “in case of emergency, or you want me to kick your ass at pool,” “I don’t think it was all pretend.”

“What are you talking about?” Niall asks. He feels hot under the collar quite suddenly. For no reason at all. Well, no good reason.

“You and Harry,” Liam answers easily. “I mean, I can tell you don’t feel great about it, but I don’t know. Most of the friends I’ve had with no interest in me haven’t risked getting shot to protect me, you know?”

Niall leans back against the rough brick wall and tilts his head. “Yeah,” says Niall, “but you’d do it for them.”

That makes Liam smile. “And you,” he acknowledges. “Still. You know what I mean.”

Niall sighs. “I just.” He swallows. Zayn’s listening very hard on the phone like maybe he’s getting info from Louis’s voicemail message; that’d surely be the smart thing. “I did, like. I think I did some stuff. When I first got bit. When I didn’t have control. I think some people got hurt, and like.”

“You think you hurt someone close to him,” Liam says slowly.

Niall knows he whispers, “Yes,” but he’s not sure any sound comes out.

“Do you know what I think?” Liam asks. Niall dares to look at him, at his broad handsome face and the familiar slope of his shoulders and the chest now patterned with wolf claw scratches, and beneath, his quick-beating heart. “I think the only reason you’d be innocent is if you weren’t paying attention. I think that goes for all of us, not just wolves, or vampires, or whatever else there is I wouldn’t have dreamt of sitting in eighth grade geometry and wondering where I’d be at twenty-two. People fuck up. All you have to do is apologize, and decide whether to forgive the ones that hurt you.”

Niall looks up at him. “For the record,” he says, “I forgive you.”

Liam smiles that crinkly-eyed smile. “I know. I forgive you, too.”

Niall raises his eyebrow. “For what?”

“Whatever,” Liam shrugs. “Sometimes it’s just nice to know, like, people aren’t holding any grudges.”

It makes Niall laugh and shake his head. He can’t say he doesn’t appreciate it, though.

Zayn bins their disposable phone. “Good news,” he says. “We got ‘em. Bad news is, they’re across town.”

Liam smiles slowly. It’s not his crinkly-eyed smile. It’s pretty fierce, actually. “No problem.”

They spend thirty-six dollars on bus fare, and tow dollars on a used polyester leash that Zayn wears around his neck as the stupidest seeing-eye dog getup that Niall’s ever seen. Liam holds the other end of the leash, looking bemused.

“Kinky,” Niall whispers, holding onto the strap on the bus ceiling. Liam manages to elbow him in the thigh pretty accurately for a blind guy. Zayn, in full wolf-form, cuts him a sharp look.

The first four stops pass without comment. They share the bus with a wizened old woman, two large men with their heads buried in a book about something or other, and a girl with headphones on, her eyes resolutely focused out the window. The passengers change every few stops, but except for a couple of surprised looks, none of them pay much attention to a werewolf, a guy wearing sunglasses on a bus after dark, and a blond guy with his fingers white-knuckled around the ceiling grip. It’s probably not that out of the ordinary for Seattle, come to think of it.

They change bus lines no fewer than three times. Just to be absolutely sure, they haven’t written down the directions, either. They’re relying on Niall’s obsessive knowledge of public transportation systems and Liam’s eerie second sense for tracking.

It’s just, how did the wolves know where to find them? If they’re being tracked, now’s the time to shake off their tail. And if it turns out it wasn’t a tracker, that it was one of the three of them, well. Niall believes it must be a tracker. Nothing else brooks any further thought.

They trade off buses at as many line intersections as possible. It’s time-consuming, and not particularly exciting. It’s hard to stay vigilant for hours on end with nothing actually happening, but tonight, Niall’s enjoying it. He missed this city and the irrepressible smells of coffee and marijuana, and the pneumatic hiss of bus brakes squeaking every time they turn a corner, and constant chatter about proto-hippie progressive stuff on every billboard and telephone pole advertising garage bands next to astrophysics lectures.

It makes Niall peculiarly homesick, though he’s finally come home, in a way. He feels distinctly how much he’s missed. His classmates will probably have all graduated by now, and Niall’s still somewhere back in junior year with a missing brother and a baby to take care of. His classmates finished high school and went to college or got jobs and moved out of their childhood homes. Niall got fighting experiences and the supernatural treatment, complete with voices in his head. It has him shaking his head. What a strange thing.

Nothing much happens. They zigzag back and forth, working their way from downtown to Rainier Beach with as many stops and changing lines as possible. The bus passengers riding with them alternate too frequently to be following them, and Zayn, who’s spent most of the evening with his heavy head on his paws and his eyes closed, hasn’t hardly flicked an ear or twitched a nostril.

Liam looks at Niall, who meets his eye and shrugs. The bus pulls in to a stop, its brakes squealing, and they disembark. “Is that a wolf?” someone asks, their voice going shrill.

“Shh,” Liam says. “It’s late. It’s a husky. You want to pet him?”

“Okay,” says the girl, sounding happy. Zayn shoots an absolutely murderous look at Liam while a college-looking girl runs her fingers through his silky fur.

“I’m going to piss,” Niall tells them. Liam salutes good-naturedly, so Niall wanders off. He’s busy looking at the toes of his trainers and feeling mildly embarrassed about having such bad aim at the urinals for a murderous wolf when he spots someone lingering outside the door. He’s known people to be creepy before in a perfectly nonmagical way, but Niall’s breath catches in his chest. He’s fighting off the shift within the span of a second, his heart leaping in his chest.

“Chill,” says Perrie, her lips pursed. She looks a little like she’s posing for a picture with her face stuff like that, and it makes Niall sigh and slump. Of course, it’s just Perrie.

He sighs. “Really, would it kill you not to pop up out of nowhere like that? It almost kills me every single time.”

“Did you die, though?” she asks dryly.

Niall wants to smile. “What are you even doing here? Just coincidentally decided to be riding buses at eleven o’clock at night, all casual-like?”

“Sure, if the cool kids are doing it. Did you wash your hands?” she asks, wrinkling her nose. Niall can smell her flowery perfume and the powdery scent of her makeup. It’s not a bad smell, but there’s something slightly empty about it. Maybe it’s that most people smell a little like sweat, and she doesn’t, or something. Like she uses really fancy deodorant.

Niall rolls his eyes. “So I’m cool? And yes.”

“I didn’t think you’d make it this far,” Perrie says, looking him over critically. Niall wonders when Zayn and Liam will get impatient and come looking for him. It’d be nice to introduce Perrie to the boys since he sees her so regularly, whether he wants to or not. Just in case she slips away again, he tells himself to memorize the belly-revealing shirt she’s wearing, and the jeans with the waistband she rolled over, and the stud in her nose. He’s never noticed before how young she looks.

“I’m an expert at buses,” Niall snorts. The bus terminal smells like pee – not Niall’s, he really did wash his hands – and the waxy industrial floor cleaner it seems like every corporation uses. It’s not very busy, which is probably to be expected. “Really, though. What are you doing here?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Perrie ignores his last comment completely.

Niall cocks his head. He knows it’s a wolflike gesture, so he tries not to do it, most of the time. Right now he’s not thinking about wolves. He’s thinking about how this girl has popped up in his life for longer than he can remember, and he still doesn’t know why. “What do you want, then?”

Perrie crosses her arms over her chest. She must be chilled, but she doesn’t shiver, or say anything about it, so Niall doesn’t mention it. “I’m warning you to be careful,” Perrie says. “It’s too late to turn back now, though you’ll want to. Oh, and the witches want to see you again.”

“The witches?” Niall repeats. “Why?”

Perrie shrugs. “I recommend bringing Harry,” is all she says.

Niall could stand looking at her for hours, he thinks, and never know more than what she’s said. “Why?”

“They like him,” she shrugs.

Niall shakes his head. “No, not that. Why do you help me?”

Perrie meets his eye. Hers are so blue, and clear, and somehow sad. Most everyone has a touch of sadness in their eyes, but not many have so much so young. “Why not?” she asks, like it’s a perfectly reasonable question.

“Niall!” Liam calls. Niall turns around to find Liam waving at him from the other end of the bus terminal, a pinched look on his face like he’s hurrying him along. Zayn’s not even sitting at his feet, so they must really be crunched for time. Niall turns to tell Perrie – something, thank you? Goodbye? – but she’s already gone. He turns and trots over to his friends, instead.

“Were you talking to someone?” Liam asks.

Niall shakes his head. “Nah. But maybe I’ll introduce you someday.”

It doesn’t make any sense. Liam nods, though, and says, “Well, we better hurry,” so they do.

They get so close. They’re so, so close. The bus drops them off at the Renton Ave. stop. They start walking from there. Zayn takes the lead in his wolf form, pulling lightly against the loose grip Liam has on his makeshift leash. Niall keeps up the rear, clocking Zayn’s six. The only indication he has that something is about to happen is Zayn’s ear turning like a satellite to a sound even Niall can’t hear, and then he’s throwing himself forward to knock Liam over. Close to the ground, they’re much smaller targets, much harder to hit.

“Shit,” Niall breathes. Liam shoulders him off and they crawl over to a line of hedges in front of someone’s garden fence. This is a residential neighborhood a block away from Kubota garden, it’s like they’re trying to be noticed, be caught. It doesn’t make any sense. “I’m gonna shift,” he warns Liam, who just nods. He pulls his pistol from the back of his jeans and starts loading bullets.

Niall wonders if they’re close enough to Louis’s and Harry’s place for them to hear the situation and come out to help. He knows he shouldn’t count on their intervention, not when he’s summarily willing them to step into a gunfight. Niall’s body is so spent on adrenaline that he doesn’t get that much of a buzz off the drug trickling into his system, which is a whole nother thing to worry about.

Focus, Niall tells himself, and reaches an unsteady hand toward Zayn.

 _Here,_ Zayn pings back. He pushes the smell of fresh oil and oleander trees, so Niall understands. Nature spirits. Not actual border attendants, but inhabitants. Niall can tell that they’re not Louis’s the same way he knows who’s in Zayn’s pack before they’ve even walked into a room; it’s just a feeling.

The nature spirits are busy turning the vegetation around them into a minefield. Climbing ivy becomes a noose to strange you, bushes become mazes to be lost in, and trees sprout bony fingers and hands. It doesn’t make Niall panic, or for that closed-in feeling to fill his chest. He feels weirdly satisfied, somehow, like – he doesn’t have to gouge anyone’s throat out, or anything. He can fight a load of bushes and maybe spare the nature spirits in the end, so long as they stop trying to kill him and his friends.

You take what you can get, is all.

Wolves aren’t much for crawling, but Niall coaxes his limbs to tiptoe over a pile of fallen leaves on the ground that could be completely innocuous or hiding something feral. He can’t see the nature spirits but he can feel them like a gentle breeze. He aims his snout into the wind and inches forward, mindful of every place he sets his paws.

In fact, Niall’s so busy avoiding traps that he doesn’t notice a full assault. He hears the distinctive groaning that he remembers from growing up not too far from a logging museum, and the videos they used to show there. If he could talk with this mouth, he’d say _Shit._ Niall darts forward, hoping for the best, and narrowly avoids the towering oak tree that the nature spirits just brought down on his head.

Niall stares at it, the echoing boom of it ringing in his ears. They brought down a _tree._ Deo could never do something like that, nor the nature spirits Niall’s met before, not unless the pack they serve is…Jesus, Niall doesn’t even want to think of it.

“Think fast!” he hears. Niall whips his head around to find Liam aiming a gun at his face, so he ducks down low, turning to watch it hit its mark. The bullet sinks harmlessly into the undulating skin of a nature spirit. Deo was a faery, a real, living thing. Nature spirits are more like the gods people tell stories about in Classical Mythology courses: abstract concepts brought to life by people humanizing them. It’s still one of Niall’s favorite and least favorite things he’s learned in this strange other world. Things can be brought to life simply by thought, but – there’s always a but – people aren’t always careful about what they think of, either.

The spirit’s center looks like a sunflower complete with seeds and petal held aloft in the midst of a gaseous green cloud. It might resemble mist for a nonmagical person to glance out of their window without a second look. Right now, conserving the secrecy of the magical world is not Niall’s top priority. Liam’s bullet clatters to the blacktop street like it hit an iron wall. Liam gapes in surprise. Niall starts rethinking his strategy.

He knows he needs to hit the target in the middle, or that Liam does, but he’s got a pistol, not a rifle. Niall could do better in human form too, but he also can’t see it well like that. His human eyes translate the nature spirit into blurriness and a headache like he needs to put his glasses on. So what’s he supposed to do?

Zayn has the answer. Well, part of one. Niall hears the shrill clatter of a metal bin being knocked over, and then Zayn is bounding over the wall from someone’s garden. He lands on the can, his four paws poised as neatly as a ballerina’s, and springs toward the center of the gaseous cloud. He puts a neat dent in it just by landing on the nature spirit’s center, but he’s not quick enough for it. The nature spirit expands and snags his hind leg, leaving Zayn suspended four feet above the blacktop by his paw, a strangled yelp yanked out of his throat.

“Zayn!” Liam cries.

Niall can hear Zayn’s near-frantic intent. _Liam,_ it says, _Liam, Liam._ Niall understands just in time. He forgot about the other nature spirit. Of course, the wind – he should’ve thought. It blows innocuous across the back of his neck again, gentle as a kiss, and Niall tenses all over like he’s been burnt. The nature spirit draws air toward it as it barrels over a yard, upending a wheelbarrow full of dirt, and bears down on Liam.

Niall can’t save both of them. He can attack the plant spirit and free Zayn, or he can target the wind spirit and distract it from Liam, but he can’t do both. The moment seems to stretch on endlessly, a bottomless chasm with _what if_ echoing all the way down to the bottom.

 _Save him,_ Zayn orders. Pick him, save Liam. The nature spirit absorbs Zayn bit by bit, drawing the life force out of him like grass and root absorbing all the nutrients out of a decaying body, and Zayn’s telling Niall to save Liam.

There’s not a trace of fear in Liam’s expression. He lines up the shot in slow motion, it feels like, his face set. The wind spirit swirls like a hurricane with bits of dirt and grass and branches stuck in. He’d suffocate sooner than Niall could find a way to the eye of the storm.

And Niall’s supposed to pick. He doesn’t have time to think. Which can he live with? Which can he live without?

Niall takes two bounding leaps and shifts in midair, aiming himself like a bullet at the sunflower-looking face of the nature spirit. He doesn’t get there first, though. Liam’s bullet does. The bullet buries itself into the flower-face of the nature spirit and the spirit shrieks and shrinks down to the size of a tree, bleeding energy like a tidal wave. Niall intercepts Zayn in midair and brings him down as gently as possible. They both land heavily on the street in a heap of skinny limbs. Zayn shifts painfully beside him, the blood leeched out of his skin. His eyes glazed with pain, Zayn looks past Niall, his eyes on Liam. “Liam,” he murmurs.

Niall’s too late. He knows it the moment he makes the attempt, but it doesn’t matter. He’s still gonna try, anyway. The storm is whipping into a cyclone even as Niall sprints as fast as he can on two legs. By some miracle, or some tragedy, the wind flings him back. It sucks Liam into the middle, the expression on Liam’s face sheer satisfaction, his purpose served.

A wolf howls, very nearby, and so powerful that Niall claps his palms over his human years and struggles not to succumb to the command to kneel, to lay down, to obey. It’s not directed at him, anyway. The nature spirit struggles against it, Liam caught just visibly through the windstorm as a dark figure in the midst of dirt suspended against the force of gravity.

Louis, irresistibly determined, howls again, lower this time, more threatening. Niall drops to his knees without wanting to, squeezing his head between his palms like he can cut the noise out. The nature spirit peters out, and Louis doesn’t have to communicate anything at all. It disperses itself on the wind, like it ought.

“Liam,” Niall says, blinking away tears forced out by wind and the force of Louis’s command. He’s dimly aware of Louis shifting, of Zayn’s cracked voice calling out in fear, but Niall keeps his attention on Liam lying almost peacefully on the blacktop. Niall crawls over to him, mindless of his busted knee and the broken glass digging into his palms.

Harry gets to him first. He kneels fluidly beside Liam, his face pinched and pale.

“Please,” Niall finds himself murmuring. He hasn’t prayed since he could see over the top of the pew in front of him, but he feels like praying now. “Please,” he murmurs.

“He has a pulse,” Harry announces. He doesn’t have to raise his voice to be heard. Niall doesn’t think he or the rest of them are so much as breathing. Harry’s face gets more pinched. “He won’t last to a hospital, though.”

“Okay, but,” Niall babbles. “Something. C’mon, think of something. He can’t die. He can’t _die._ We’re the good guys. Good guys don’t die.”

The rest of them look down mutely. The worst part is, Niall can hear Liam struggling for breath past his clogged airway, hear his heart beat thumping irregularly. Niall swallows. “Can’t - ”

Louis shakes his head slowly. He has Zayn’s arm over his shoulders, though Zayn’s doing his best to wriggle out of his grip and sink down beside Liam. “This is it,” he says, his voice as low as Niall’s ever heard it. “We die.”

It’s too much to bear. Niall puts his head in his hands and feels like howling.

“What’s that?” Louis asks.

Zayn murmurs something. He clears his throat, then, “You’ve a vampire, yeah? Let’s change him.”

That idea sucks the breath out of Niall’s lungs. To change someone – to turn them into a vampire – Niall starts chewing on his fingernails.

“He wouldn’t want that,” Harry says, firmly but gently. “He wouldn’t want to be that.”

“He wants to be alive, listen to him,” Zayn snaps, gesturing at Liam. Liam’s eyes are closed but his chest is rising and falling fast, fast, his heartbeat unwinding like a ticking clock.

It’s Louis, surprisingly, who backs Zayn up. “If you could save Gemma,” he says, “even like this. You’d do it.”

Harry drops his head, his fists clenched at his sides. But he stops arguing.

It sets in slowly, like the pain from a bullet wound, what they’re about to try to do. Niall remembers thinking, earlier, that this is what happens when you love someone too much. Good and bad, and right and wrong, stop mattering. You love them whether or no.

“Where is he?” Niall asks. He pushes himself to his feet feeling like some version of Pinocchio in need of an oil treatment. “Let’s get him up, Harry, please,” so Niall and Harry each drape one of Liam’s heavy arms over their shoulders and lift up.

“The house is this way,” Louis gestures. He doesn’t have to tell them to hurry.

 _There’s a chance it won’t take,_ is all Niall can think, over and over, while they carry Liam’s dying body to the house. He’s not sure if he’s holding onto that like dread, or a promise. Carrying Liam’s weight across his shoulders feels like bearing the weight of the world. Niall feels the way Atlas probably does about it, though. Like if he lets go or moves out from under it, the sky will crash into the earth, and nothing will be the same. People die all the time and the sun still rises and sets as ever, but it doesn’t feel that way. Niall feels like he’s seen the edge of the known world, and they’re too close to plummeting over the side. _Here be dragons._

Louis’s and Harry’s house is on a side street off Roxbury on the upper edge of Rainier Beach. The house isn’t located on a beach, but at the bottom of a gentle decline. The driveway spills into the house’s garage, which is larger than Niall’s and Zayn’s last house, and backs up onto a thin greenbelt. If Niall had the option to stop and look his fill, he’d certainly be stuck a while; this house looks too much like the ones from the storybooks, like the houses where nothing ever happens to people who live there.

“C’mon,” Harry says; he must be able to feel the lag in Niall’s step. Niall hurries along. They duck around the side of the house, over a walkway that Niall can feel more than see in the dark. Harry pulls a little key fob out of his pocket and presses a button, and the door gives a pneumatic hiss and swings inward.

Niall tries to catch Zayn’s eye, but Zayn’s gaze is glued to Liam like his eyes are keeping Liam alive. Harry and Niall set Liam down gently in what rich people probably call a mud room but what Niall knows as a big hallway with a bench on one side.

Harry shouts, “Grimmy!”

Louis’s voice, more even, though tense as a piano wire, “Nick!”

The vampire arrives in front of them with a chittering, squeaking sound. Vampires can’t teleport, but they give the impression, Niall thinks. It’s probably some kind of weird space displacement thing like running wolves, but Niall doesn’t have Bressie on hand to explain it to him.

God. He knows he’s just trying to distract himself. There’s no keeping his eyes or his mind off of Liam for long; his eyes keep roving back to him, willing him to keep breathing. Keep living.

“Change him,” Zayn says. His voice comes out a weak rasp. “Into you. Into one of you.”

Niall doesn’t know Nick well enough to understand the nuances of his expression, but he doesn’t snap to, so it doesn’t look good.

“He’ll be cursed,” Nick says, folding his arms over his chest. He’s so tall and broad that he gives the impression of filling the wide hallway with his body alone. “With eternal life.” Then, “Louis, love, what happened to you?”

“Don’t ‘love’ me,” Louis says. “It’s a scratch. Save the kid.”

Only now does Niall notice the red stain spreading across the side of Louis’s shirt. Harry’s face sports a myriad of tiny cuts, and they both have purple shadows under their eyes. Exhaustion doesn’t look good on anybody.  

“They want you to,” Harry says, looking at Nick. He draws himself up and closer to Louis, as if to separate him from Nick.

“He was a hunter,” Nick argues while Liam’s lungs fill with fluid and he chokes to death on his own breath.

Niall weaves his fingers together at the back of his head and squeezes. “None of that matters! You think I wanted to be this? Shit, but it’s better than being dead.”

The werewolves and Nick quiet, their eyes on him. Liam gurgles helplessly on the floor. Niall hopes he’s truly unconscious; the pain must be terrible.

“Fuck,” says Grimmy, and rolls up his sleeve. He bites his own wrist and blood, dark red and syrupy, trickles out slowly. It doesn’t look like the blood Niall’s seen wounded vampires bleed out. Hungry. He must be hungry. Nick’s pupils expand till they look like the pictures Niall’s seen of the Earth eclipsing the sun. His fangs drop down from his gums, glistening with vampire venom.

It’s a strangely beautiful and awful thing to watch. Nick leans down over Liam’s lax body and Niall has a single, unending moment of doubt. Maybe it’d be better to die human than live to become a monster. But maybe humans can become monsters, too. Nick sinks his fangs into Liam’s tender throat, his venom falteringly pushed along by Liam’s struggling heart. Nick smears his thick red blood over the open wound, which sizzles and steams. Sealing the wound, cauterizing it.

Trapping the venom inside.

Niall’s legs give out and he lands hard on his butt, his arms gathered around his legs like they offer any sort of protection.

He can hear Liam’s heart go further and further off rhythm. Zayn has Liam’s hand between his, and he keeps bringing Liam’s knuckles up to his mouth to kiss them over and over again. Harry and Louis look like statues, they’re so motionless, as if any movement they make might upset the way this night unfolds.

Sometimes Niall feels that way, too. Like everything that’s happening is part of a dance with elaborate choreography, only nobody told him the steps.

Time slows to a crawl, or maybe it moves very fast; Niall listens to four hearts beat, and waits for Liam’s to stop.

He lets out his last breath softly, the way Niall’s dad might sigh settling into his seat at a baseball game. Four agonized hearts beat. Another pulse, another.

“When –” Harry starts, but Zayn shushes him.

God. Please, Niall prays, and he doesn’t even know if he’s praying to god or to witches or for a miracle. He just wants Liam to live.

Liam’s heart doesn’t start again. He takes a deep, rattling breath, and his body starts the process of coughing up the dirt and dust he inhaled when he was trapped inside the vortex.

He’s not alive anymore, but he’s not dead, either.

Zayn muffles a sob of relief in Liam’s chest and leaves his head there, the better to hear his lungs work.

“There you have it, then,” Nick says, sounding not entirely satisfied. “Suppose he’ll make it.”

“C’mon, let’s get him to a bed,” Louis says. Nick makes some comment about fixing up Louis next that Louis waves off. He helps Zayn up and together, they awkwardly shuffle down the hall.

Niall’s so tired he thinks he could fall asleep right here, with cold linoleum tile chilling his back and an even colder look from Harry’s face. Instead, he makes himself stand up. “I,” he starts, stops. Where does he even begin?

“Here, let me show you your room,” Harry says. He leads Niall down the hall, up a flight of wooden stairs, and then down a narrower hall. He opens the door, so Niall steps in. He doesn’t smell anything, or hear anything, but he thinks, again, that it’s better just to trust Harry. Maybe he’s leading him into a trap; maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Niall’s gotta have hope.

Harry flicks the lights on. A double bed takes up most of the space in the room, but there’s a wooden dresser opposite it, and a nightstand with actual, living flowers in a vase. Niall feels like he’s dirtied it just by walking in. He’s spent too many nights crashed out across a row of seats at a Laundromat or shivering in a too-thin jacket. He doesn’t belong here.

“It’s nice,” he says. “Feels, like. I can take the couch if you need the space, or whatever.”

“It’s just a bed,” Harry says gently. “There’s a shower across the hall, too. I can lend you some clean clothes, if you want.”

Niall swallows. “Right, yeah. That’d be…thanks.”

Harry shakes his head. Niall’s stomach clenches in apprehension. “I owe you an apology,” he says. There’s still the same cold thread in his voice and on his face, like Niall’s looking at him through a thin sheen of ice, but maybe it’s not that Harry’s furious with him. Maybe it’s that Harry’s afraid Niall won’t accept it.

“What for?” Niall asks.

“Believing the worst,” Harry explains.

Niall’s heart gets lodged somewhere in his throat. “What?”

“When you told me…when you said. Look.” He pulls a sheaf of paper out of the inside pocket of his coat. “The coroner’s report. My sister. I thought, like. I don’t know. He reckoned she died in late October last year. You and Zayn weren’t even, like, close to Oregon yet, were you?”

Niall sinks down slowly on the bed. He wants so badly to let himself shake apart with relief. He’s so afraid to. “October last year. No. We, I. I couldn’t, you know. I thought I was gonna kill Theo, I was so afraid of hurting him, so I ran. Gave out somewhere in the middle hot part of California, and then I went east, and met Zayn.”

Harry crouches down in front of Niall. He puts his palm, gently, over Niall’s bad knee. Niall can’t not look at him. “I said we were friends,” Harry says, his voice soft. “I should’ve believed better of you. Sorry I didn’t.”

“Christ’s sakes, Harry,” Niall laughs, a little hysterically. He tangles his fingers in Harry’s stupid curls and pulls him up into a hug that’s all awkward knees and elbows.

Harry pulls away after a long, long moment. “I don’t think you killed her,” he says softly. He swallows. “But it begs the question. Niall, I don’t think those are your memories.”

“So…” Niall licks his lips, unsure what to feel. He chose wrong and Liam died but he’s not actually dead, and he has Harry pressing his leg and arm against Niall’s, and God, Zayn will probably hate him forever. Liam, too. And Harry. But Harry. Funny, Niall thinks again, how that little word feels so much like hope. “So whose are they?”

Harry shrugs elegantly. He gives Niall that look, again, so Niall knows he’s not done apologizing for things yet.

“What is it?”

“And, er. For thinking you might’ve done, and that you might’ve been an inside man.”

It takes a long moment for this to click. “You were the one on the phone with Zayn.”

“I had to be sure,” Harry says. There’s a crystalline note of self-defense in his voice, and all the shakiness of someone asking to be forgiven who’s not sure they ought to be. “I gave Zayn the wrong address thinking, like, if you knew. You’d send it along. But nobody showed up.”

“So how’d Louis get hurt?”

“Setting up boundaries,” Harry sighs. He slides off the edge of the bed and starts pacing. “We’re calling our pack in from the far reaches.”

Niall looks up at him. “Zayn’s doing the same thing. It’s going to be, like. Our last stand.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, and he smiles. “I’m sorry if I disappointed you.”

It reminds Niall of Liam at the shopping center, telling him that he didn’t have any grudges against him. That they were alright. “Nah,” Niall says. “You did just fine.”

Niall showers while Harry fetches him a clean set of clothes to borrow. He leans his head against the shower wall and watches dirt and blood both swirl down the drain, leaving him feeling rubbed raw. He didn’t kill Gemma. So why does he remember it?

He stands under the showerhead until the water runs cold, and then he turns the nozzle off. Harry’s waiting for him in his room when he gets back. Niall feels acutely conscious of the towel knotted around his waist, and the bruises healing on his back and shoulders, and the claw marks on the top of his arms. Harry hands him a neatly folded stack of clothes and turns his back to give Niall some privacy. “Can I sleep with you tonight?” he asks, while Niall holds up a pair of checkered boxers and wonders if they’re Harry’s.

Niall listens to his heart beat like a drum once, twice. “Zayn knows it wasn’t real,” Niall finally admits. He sticks his skinny legs through the pants and the soft sweatpants Harry lent him. “You don’t have to.”

“Can I, though?”

Niall finishes pulling on his own soft gray hoodie. Harry turns, something very vulnerable in his expression, and it’s not even really a question. Niall thinks about warning him that he still shifts in his sleep, and increasingly he can’t tell dream from reality, and he’s not used to…all this. Maybe he never will be again. Harry knows, though.

“Sure,” Niall says.

Harry slides into bed with his back to Niall, but backs up till he’s no more than a breath away, close enough Niall can feel the warmth from his skin. Niall screws his courage to the sticking place and presses his face against the nape of Harry’s neck. He smells like massage oil and peach crème pie and laundry drying under bright sunshine. Harry reaches back and pulls Niall’s arm over his waist. Niall closes his eyes, well aware that Harry can hear his heart thumping a red tattoo against his back. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to fall asleep, but he’s out in moments.

*** 

Niall wakes up alone after a night spent dreaming about warm breath in cold air, the smell of rich, damp oil, paw pads thumping against the forest floor, eyes glittering in the darkness. It’s eerie, and unsettling, but not the worst dreams he’s ever had. Not by a long shot. He lays in bed and stares up at the ceiling, relaxing his muscles one by one. Niall tells himself to relax his body, concentrate his mind. It was one of the first things Zayn showed him when Niall was so keyed-up he’d shift at the slightest disturbance.

He can hear the distinctive pattern of Zayn’s heartbeat across the house, and near it another pulse, a little faster and louder but no less steady. Louis. Niall fills the dead space between them with Liam, knowing full well Zayn wouldn’t have left him. Nick might be somewhere about, or not. And Harry’s in the kitchen, whistling sweetly while eggs and bacon sizzle on frying pans and bread warms in the toaster.

It’s with a sudden, fierce pang of longing that Niall thinks of Bressie and Laura and Theo. God, it’s such a stupid thing to do. He shouldn’t even think of it. And yet, Niall throws his legs over the side of the bed and crosses over to the desk. He sits down silently in the creaky desk chair and pulls the phone into his lap. It’s a heavy plastic, old-fashioned thing, but when Niall lifts the receiver and holds it to his ear, he hears a dial tone.

For all he knows, someone is monitoring this house. For all he knows, Bressie wouldn’t even want to hear from him. Maybe Theo’s forgotten him in the months since Niall couldn’t stay away.

That’s the thing about wolves. They’re loyal to their packs, to their homes. And Niall can’t bring himself not to be loyal to them.

He dials.

Bressie picks up mid-laugh, his familiar loud voice booming across the speaker so loud Niall thinks that surely the other wolves must be able to hear it. “Hi, hello, who’s this?”

Niall closes his eyes. Laughter, and happiness, and a world away from this quiet house. But Niall’s been having someone else’s dreams and with every shift, it’s harder and harder to pull himself back. One of his friends died last night because Niall made the wrong decision, and good guys die.

“Niall,” Bressie breathes. “Jesus, son. Thank God you’re alive.”

Niall leans forward till his head rests on the desk.

“There’ve been murders on the news,” Bressie says. “Gorings, and animal attacks. Things must be getting heavy for you.”

He closes his eyes.

“Theo asks about you,” Bressie says. “Every single day. So, you – you come back home when you can, alright? We’ll be here.”

Niall lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and nods, his eyes squeezed shut.

“We love you,” Bressie finishes. Niall listens to him breathe for a long, long time before he finally reaches out and presses the button on the receiver. End call.

It’ll be what he has to hold onto, Niall knows, when the wolves descend. He clears his throat and sits up, brushes his face with his palms, and goes to the kitchen to help Harry with breakfast.

It’s the weirdest debriefing Niall’s ever been to. Louis sits at the head of the table with his feet kicked up on the edge of Nick’s chair. He talks with a mouthful of eggs and bacon in his mouth, which has Zayn grimacing every other word; at the very least, Harry had the foresight to make Zayn turkey bacon instead of the usual stuff.

“First things first,” Louis starts. “Liam’s recovering, he’s gonna sleep for a while,” he shoots a look at Nick, “we don’t know how long, apparently being a vampire is a very imprecise science, and then, like. Well. He lived.” Niall tries to make eye contact with Zayn, who trains his eyes on his plate. He hasn’t touched his fried eggs even though Harry made them just the way Niall said he took them, crispy on the edges but runny in the middle. Louis goes on, “And we’re all here, which is nice.” He frowns. “Actually, I don’t know. I figured you were here to help.”

“We are,” Zayn confirms.

Harry pushes the crusts of his toast around his plate. “We could use it, Lou. And we can divide the territory up later.”

“Wolves,” Nick mutters, rolling his eyes. He doesn’t sound least fond. “Always so concerned with territory.”

Louis digs his toes into Nick’s thigh. “Shut up,” he says mildly. “It’s your territory, too.”

“Oh, no,” Nick says. “Don’t legitimize us. I want to be your kept man, like a dirty mistress. It’s sexier that way.”

“Also kind of sexist,” Harry observes mildly. “And gross.”

“I don’t think packs have really coordinated this way before,” Louis thinks aloud.

Harry responds, “Actually, they have, yeah. Er, my mom and dad. Not my stepdad, my real dad. They, like, married, from two different packs. _Bella gerant alii_ ,” he recites.

“Right, since I don’t speak Roman, whatever,” Louis says. “But alright. Who wants to talk about a counterattack?”

“Me,” Niall pops his head up. He’s been waiting for someone to bring this up. He’s ready, he’s so ready to start hitting them where it hurts rather than being hurt himself. They’ve killed his friends and attacked his loved ones, chased him out of town and brought him back to the one place he thought he’d never see again. Niall’s ready to stop running.

Nick shakes his head. “That’s what I’ve come to tell you. You’re not going to like your odds against this pack.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a pack,” Nick explains grimly. “It’s more like a…a conglomerate, yeah? So it’s like, here’s a bunch of corporations, all with a bunch of wolves, all working together. A conglomeration.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. Multiple packs. No wonder they’ve been getting their asses handed to them right and left.

“Why?” Zayn asks, his eyes narrowed.

Nick shrugs. It doesn’t look particularly light or easy; he looks twitchy and nervous, uncomfortable, instead. “Reckon they were bought off. The original pack was big enough, and strong enough, that they threatened the other pack. Didn’t kill them, though. Offered them a deal. Work for them, or die. You can imagine how many wolves would rather get paid than get killed.”

“Paid how?” Harry asks, his brow furrowing.

“That’s what I was doing all that recon on, thank you for calling it a ‘holiday,’ love,” Nick teases. He squeezes Louis’s ankle, his voice gentle. “Look, take Harry’s family as an example. Where’d they get the money for this house from?”

Harry scratches his head. “We have, like, a lot of orchards. Cherries, and blueberries. Apples.”

“And why do you think your crops grow so well?”

“Nature spirits,” Zayn murmurs.

Nick nods supportively. “Imagine if you had control of all the magical creatures within a whole state. A tristate area. The whole country. They employ the wolves who submit, and kill the ones that don’t, and then there’s a nifty little snowball effect going.”

It sounds…surprisingly boring, actually. Niall thought someone must’ve had a grudge against them, or something; some proper reasoning, a really compelling reason for trying to wipe them off the map. Instead, it’s about money.

“Who’s the alpha?” Harry asks. “Did you get their name?”

Nick nods again. “Ben. That’s all I’ve got.”

The name rings a bell. “Ben? That’s the name – that’s what Gemma said, in the dream.”

“The dreams you’re having of memories that don’t belong to you,” Louis says, folding his hands in front of him. Funny how these things don’t even sound particularly remarkable anymore.

“Yeah.”

Zayn clears his throat. “So, that’s it then? We’re to, what, run away?”

Nick shrugs. “I dunno, pup. That’s up to you.”

“We don’t run,” Louis says immediately.

“What I don’t get,” Harry says in his slow, thoughtful drawl, “is how we haven’t heard of this sooner.”

Niall rubs at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “You have, remember? In the…in the memory, I suppose, Gemma said it. She said, ‘So you can tell Ben that the harder he tries, the sooner the end will come. I’ve seen it myself.’” Niall’s brain makes a connection. “You don’t reckon she visited the witches, do you? Last time I saw her, Perrie told me to pay them another visit.”

Zayn looks doubtful. “What, back in Mohegan? That’s hours away.”

“Perrie,” Louis repeats. “You spoke to a girl named Perrie? Why?”

Niall blinks at his tone. “I dunno, she – she finds me, like, I guess. She just told me to be careful. And to pay them another visit.” And bring Harry if he could, but for some reason, Niall feels reticent to tell the others that part.

He’s a little afraid the witches will show someone else the vision of himself and Harry kissing, and the world falling down around their feet just after. Their fault. Niall’s put that mostly out of his mind, to be honest. They said it was the right thing to do, and so…oh, but Niall doesn’t really put any stock by that. He’d done it just because he wanted to. Maybe what Niall is most afraid of is that the witches will show the others what’s to become of Niall and his deteriorating mind. He doesn’t want them to see him as a feral wolf. An animal. A beast.

“You’ve seen them before,” Louis says slowly.

Niall trades a nervous glance with Harry, whose cheeks sport a rosy tint. Harry admits, “Yeah, we – they wanted us to see.”

“I don’t think you saw the full picture,” is all Louis says. Then, “I’m coming with you, Niall.”

“What, now? Don’t we have, like, strategizing to do?”

“The rest of our packs are coming, Liam won’t rise till sunset at the earliest, and there’s not a hell of a lot we can do in the meantime.”

Nick states the obvious. “Love, you know I just don’t think that two little packs are going to make much of a difference.”

“That’s what people said about David, and Jason, and Achilles. Also Hercules,” Harry chimes in.

Nick and Louis both roll their eyes. “Yes, thanks for the history lesson, Harold,” says Louis. “You guys hold down the fort, keep an eye on Liam. If everything goes to plan, we should be back before sundown.”

“Yes, but,” Harry muses, “when has everything gone to plan?”

Harry loans Niall another change of clothes to wear to the witches’, which Niall still doesn’t fully understand. How’s he meant to find them again when he left them some four hundred miles behind? He didn’t _think_ teleportation was real, or possible. Maybe he was wrong.

“Thanks,” Niall tells Harry.

Harry leans against the doorframe instead of moving away, so Niall clutches the bundle of clothes to his chest and wonders if he looks as awkward as he feels. “I’ve been thinking,” Harry says, “about what you said. About how you didn’t ask to be this.”

“None of us did,” Niall starts immediately, though that’s not quite true. Harry was born into it, but he could’ve fled with his family after his sister died. Niall and Zayn were bit, and Niall doesn’t know about Louis, but maybe it’s just that their lives could’ve unwound differently. Niall never went into the forest that day. Zayn didn’t date a shifter.

“I just wanted you to know,” Harry goes on. “The rest of us, we’ll be fine.” He shrugs, a weak smile on his face. “We haven’t got anyone left to lose. But you’ve got that baby. So if it comes down to it, I just…say goodbye if you can, alright?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Niall says. “Just leave, or run away. I wouldn’t.” It’s not like he’s done much protecting of Theo lately, anyway. He can’t even bring himself to stay away.

The expression on Harry’s face hasn’t changed. It actually looks a bit…wistful. “You know that’s why I liked you so much? In the start, I mean, before I knew you?”

“Hm?” Harry tilts his head.

“The night we met, and we were fighting. I’d never seen a wolf look so much like a human before. You could’ve killed me, but you didn’t. I didn’t know that I could, like.” Niall swallows. “I didn’t know it could be like that. Safe. I could be safe.”

Harry’s face gentles so much it looks breakable. Niall’s heart contracts in fondness, and familiarity. He doesn’t know Harry’s favorite food or whether he eats concessions at the movie theater, but he knows he can count on him in an emergency. He doesn’t know what he thinks of religion or politics, but he knows that Harry apologizes when he fucks up, and that he forgives. Harry pulls himself away from the wall and takes a tentative step closer to Niall, then another. “You are,” Harry says.

What wouldn’t Niall give to believe that? He shakes his head. “No, I’m – I’m losing my mind, Harry. I’m not safe.”

“Well, true,” Harry says. He ghosts his palm over Niall’s cheek; Niall leans into his touch. “And you keep throwing yourself right into the middle of things, which is unfair, you know; it’s very scary.”

“Scary?”

“Would you believe,” Harry asks, “for real, and not for pretend, that I don’t want anything to happen to you?”

Niall struggles to take a breath. He wants everything to stay still just for a moment, just so that it lasts that much longer. “Why?”

Harry’s close enough now that Niall can smell the orange juice on his breath, and hear his pulse echoed in his wrists. “Because,” Harry says. “You’re one of the good guys.”

Niall closes his eyes. The version of himself that Harry sees is the one that Niall’s always wanted to be. It feels like a gift. Harry slants his mouth over Niall’s, so Niall drops the bundle of clothes in his arms and twists his fingers in Harry’s hair. He doesn’t think of the usual things, like _Is he a good kisser? Is he using too much tongue? How does his breath smell?_

Instead, Niall lets himself be kissed. Harry urges Niall’s mouth open with the tip of his tongue, his thumb brushing the corner of Niall’s mouth like he wants to touch the kiss with more than his lips. Harry’s other hand slides up the back of Niall’s borrowed t-shirt.

Niall cracks his eyes open just to see what Harry’s face looks like while they kiss. He’s a bit of a blur this close, but Niall can make out the delicate purple veins threading across his thin eyelids, and the laughter lines settling into the corners of his eyes. He kisses Niall hungrily, but his face is serene.

“Can I?” Harry asks, curling his fingers in Niall’s shirt.

Niall nods, not trusting himself to speak. He lifts his arms so Harry can pull his shirt off over his head. It lands softly on the floor, and Harry greedily puts his hands back on Niall’s hips. He noses down Niall’s throat, so Niall tilts his head back to give him better access. Harry’s lips drag soft and wet over Niall’s skin, and just as quickly as the kiss gained momentum, it slows. Harry stops with his mouth right over the pulse bounding in Niall’s throat, his fingers fit to the slats of Niall’s ribs. Niall smooths his hand down the back of Harry’s head. “I’ll be fine,” he murmurs.

“You will,” Harry says, low and fierce. He sucks hard enough on Niall’s skin to bruise, and then he pulls back. “Or I’ll kill you myself.”

Louis meets them coming out of Niall’s room. “What – oh. Ew. Really? You couldn’t wait till, I don’t know, we weren’t about to go visit a coven of batshit witches?”

“You don’t have a leg to stand on, I’ve heard you with Nick too many nights to count,” Harry says pleasantly.

It sort of feels like nighttime right now, with the windows covered with thick curtains. It must be for Nick’s benefit, and now Liam’s, too. It makes the house feel like a proper wolf’s den, a safe secure place just out of reach of prying eyes.

“Ready?” Louis asks Niall, sizing him up.

Niall tilts up his chin, forgetting that Harry’s left the shape of his mouth on Niall’s throat. “‘Course.”

Louis sets off at a brisk walk. He lights a cigarette between his pale fingers and pulls greedily on the end of the cancer stick. Niall stares on longingly. “Can I have a hit?” he asks, finally, the third time Louis pulls away to exhale into the bright, clear Seattle day.

“Don’t let me be a bad influence,” Louis says, but hands it over anyway.

It tastes like burning. Niall exhales slowly, his lungs holding onto the scent. Okay. Now he’s really ready.

Louis leads them to the nearest Goodwill. This one is newer and the nicer than the one back in Mohegan, with its garden growing up round the windows and the sidewalk cracked and broken. Niall swallows his doubts and follows Louis instead, his heart sticking in his throat. “Feel that?” Louis murmurs.

Niall takes count. Oh, hell, Louis’s right. The wolf – it’s nowhere to be found. The pressure in Niall’s brain vanishes, although it leaves behind the pain, and horror of the memories. Just because he can’t touch the wolf doesn’t mean he’s forgotten what it was like. Niall rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand again and wonders what precisely that means.

“C’mon,” Louis says, shooting glances back and forth. He sets down the decorative bit of glassware in his hand and sneaks toward the backroom.

There’s a girl who looks to be in high school in the back sorting through heaps and boxes of donations. It makes Niall start, a bit, because this is so much the same but so different. He thinks about the witches’ appearance undulating through time and the eerie cadence of their voices, like they might all be speaking or only one, and thinks he understands better. Some people, and things, are more than what they are.

The back office is unoccupied when they sneak in, though its obvious someone manages this branch. There’s pictures of a mother and her child building a snowman on the wall along with a clutch of crayon drawings.

They wait. Louis clears his throat and Niall finally clocks that he might be nervous; he says, “Well? You did ring.”

The walls move. Niall makes a muffled noise and tries to step back, but bumps into Louis, instead. He can’t blink. The walls are – wait, no. It’s. Jesus, it’s like camoflauge, the way the witches painted themselves into the background. “What the fuck!”

“I hate when people say that,” says one witch crossly. “I never know what they want us to answer.”

“I’m referring to you coming out of the wall, shitting hell,” says Niall.

Louis glances at him. “Nice one,” he comments dryly. “Now.” He clears his throat. “How may we be of service?”

The witches wave him away. “It’s not your turn yet,” says one. “Soon, soon. To repay your favor.”

The others titter their approval. “Soon, yeah. Soon.”

“What about me?” Niall asks curiously.

“Mm,” answer the witches. “Farther off. Well, closer. Think of it like a point, and not a line, won’t you? Then you’ll know.”

Which…doesn’t make any sense at all. Niall hesitates, eyeing them curiously, and realizes they look worse for the wear than the last time Niall saw them. Their multitudinous layers of clothing look frayed at the edges and dingy, like they’ve been left in the sun to fade for a while, and they don’t shift so easily between ages. Most of them are caught somewhere between knowing too much and too little, which Niall sympathizes with. He gets the feeling he knows enough to put something together, but can’t do it.

As gently as he can, Niall says, “You asked me to come back. Perrie said.”

“Perrie,” Louis repeats, a note of excitement entering in his voice. He sounds like he’s remembered just why they’re there. “Perrie, as in a member of this coven. As in one of your sisters. She was, wasn’t she?”

“‘Was,’” the witch with a cloud of soft brown hair repeats. “As if it’s that simple. Like, oh, yes, she was here, and now she’s not, and things that were simply cease to exist.”

“They don’t?” Niall asks.

The witches quiet, zeroing in on him. He wishes he’d kept his big mouth shut. “Of course not,” says the witch with kind-looking eyes. “You should know that better than most, brother of Greg Horan.”

Niall’s heart just about stops in his chest. “You know – how do you – did you see him, is he okay?”

The witches hedge a response. “Yes and no,” says the black-haired witch. Niall’s heart fills like a balloon fit to burst. Greg, alive. Whatever else the witches meant, Niall will take. Greg alive. They add, “Some things get lost and you find them again someday like a bit of change buried between couch cushions. Some things get lost and you don’t realize that they’ve been stolen from you. You didn’t misplace them.”

Niall tells himself to breathe. To think. They talk in riddles, but if Niall had the power of foresight, wouldn’t he do the same thing? He wouldn’t want to tell someone exactly what was going to happen to them, only for them to squirm under the ruling. He’d rather have the power, as he does now, to pretend he has a choice. Niall didn’t think he really had one, and then he thought it’d been made for him, but looking at these witches whose power is fraying at the seams, he thinks understands. Some choices you have to make again, and again, and again. And that’s choosing. “What was it for you?” he asks. “And her. Perrie. Did she leave?”

“Yes,” the last witch answers. “And no. She was supposed to come back.”

Niall feels that with a soft pang. So was Greg. So was he, too, to Theo. He swallows. “But she can’t.”

“Taken,” the witches murmur, agreeing.

“She was killed,” Louis says. “Don’t you remember?” he asks them.

“You do?” Niall asks Louis in surprise.

Louis nods. “They –” he swallows, and shoots a nervous look at the witches. “They turned me, all of them.”

““Why?” Niall gasps. He didn’t know witches could turn a human into a werewolf. “What?”

“The wolf is a witch’s gift,” the witches explain. “The power of nature. Raw, and real. Nature is powerful and everlasting. But it is not beautiful. It is not even kind.”

The look in Louis’s eye becomes distant. “I was fourteen,” he said. “Very nearly too old, but desperate. I had a family, then,” he says, and his voice is a thousand years old, “to protect.”

“But you left them behind,” says the witch with inky black hair, the lines on her face deepening. “To keep them safe.”

It sounds unerringly like Niall’s story. “I came back,” Louis admits in a whisper. “To see if they could take it away. Change me back. But Perrie was gone.”

All of the witches look older now, actually. “Yes. We had a vision. We changed you. All is as it should be.”

“Should be?” Louis snaps. “Look around you! I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen, but I can fucking guess. That other pack is closing in. Twenty wolves aren’t going to stand up to them. And I’ll be dead before I serve them.”

“Louis,” Niall murmurs, because he thinks he understands now. He thinks back to the vision he saw of himself and Harry kissing, and the rest of the world collapsing into pieces like the tide rolling over a sandcastle, the way the future was blotted out like someone pinching a candle flame. “They don’t mean it – like that. You’re not ensuring the future, are you?” Niall asks them. “You’re trying to change it.”

The witches don’t share a look, but it feels like it, the way the energy between them intensifies. “This is a big life,” says the witch with soft brown hair. “And things break, and get lost. But it’s worth fixing.”

Louis shakes his head. “C’mon. No more riddles.”

“The wolf is our gift,” says the witch with black hair, and the one with brown, and the two other witches, equally as beautiful and terrifying. A tingle runs down Niall’s spine when he realizes they must’ve been human once. “It is ours to give, and ours to take away.”

Niall can’t quite process that. “Take…away? You mean you can…?”

A feverish glint is lit in the back of Louis’s eyes. “What do we have to do, then? For you to help us. What’s it going to cost?”

“Nothing,” they say. Even to Niall, it feels like half an answer. “We’ve told you. All is as it ought to be.” The one with black hair adds, “Everything dies. You can’t win. You can only try.”   

They wink out of existence like the last bit of the sun under the horizon.

*** 

Louis sits down on the curb outside, so Niall sits down beside him. “Fuck,” he says. “This is like the coach telling you your team can’t win before the game even starts. You know?”

“Mm,” Niall nods. He’s still hung up on Greg being alive, and that…well, he doesn’t know. He still feels like his future is pretty much set in stone. And he hasn’t forgotten about the debt he owes the witches, either. The favor. He has a feeling they’ll call on it at the absolute worst moment.

“No,” Louis says. “This is like the coach telling you that you’re never going to win a single game so long as you play, and then tells you to give it your best. Like, what even is that? What kind of fate?” He huffs and lights a cig. Louis takes an angry pull, then makes a face while he breathes out. “I hate these things.”

But Niall knows a thing or two about losing. “Still, like,” he says, feeling rather lame and not very bright. “It still matters how you play the game. You know.”

Louis looks at him in wonder. “Where did you come from?”

“Just a few blocks away, actually. Near Yesler Terrace.”

“Not like that,” Louis says impatiently. “I mean, who bit you?”

Niall cups his chin in his hand and traces a finger along the grainy cement. The city smells like exhaust and spilled gasoline and faintly of weed, and somewhere along the breeze, the pine trees he grew up under. “Dunno,” he answers truthfully. “Went out to the woods one day thinking I could find my brother, I guess. I dunno. Knew it was stupid, but it was like, I had to find him, you know? Didn’t think I could make it without him. Must’ve fallen asleep, or something. Anyway, next thing I know, it’s the next day, and I’ve got this mark on my leg. I thought it was bug bites, ‘cos it’d already started healing. I made it all the way back to class on Monday before I shifted.”

“How?” Louis asks softly.

Niall scratches that much harder on the sidewalk. “Just. Like. Always figured I was overreacting a bit, with things being too loud, and stuff. The guidance counselor called me into her office to talk about – I don’t know what, actually. I never went. I thought she called child protective services, so I hid in the bathroom. One minute, I’m looking at myself, you know. Red-faced and scared, telling myself to calm down. Next thing I know I’ve got paws, and fur.” And teeth. “Took me three days on my own in the woods to shift back.”

“And the person who bit you, they never…?”

Niall shrugs, then shakes his head. “I don’t think they meant to, like. Sometimes I’d hear stuff in the shift, but it wasn’t stuff like Zayn sends me. It was all jumbled, garbled, like they didn’t even know the connection was there. It scared the shit out of me, though,” Niall tries for a laugh. “Till I met Zayn, and he explained it to me. Joining his pack got rid of it.”

Louis lets out a low whistle. “Shit, dude.” He hands Niall his cig. Niall takes a puff and hands it back. “Maybe that’s who’s inside your head, though. Your old alpha, or whatever.”

“Maybe,” Niall shrugs. Maybe, but explaining it doesn’t give Niall any solutions.

“And you never came home?”

“Just once,” Niall says. “Just to check.” ‘Course, he needn’t have bothered; Theo’s in good hands with Bressie and Laura, and if Bressie would just stop talking about him, he’d forget Niall soon enough. He could be normal. Ordinary. A tiny, private part of Niall is so, so happy that he hasn’t forgotten. Niall can’t count the hours of sleep he lost feeding the baby a bottle every two hours and changing his dirty diapers.

Niall missed the last two weeks of his sophomore year taking care of the newborn, and the rest of the summer trying to keep him happy. They weren’t miserable months, though. They were the happiest Niall remembers. Sometimes he can still feel Theo’s tiny heart beating against his while Niall laid on the couch reading _Harry Potter_ aloud. Greg sent as much money as he could, and they got by. They were making it. And then Niall went and got himself bit.

“Shit,” says Louis again. “Let’s go fucking look at him.”

“What?” Niall demands, looking up at him. Now that they’re outside of the witches’ presence, he can feel pain building at the front of his skull again, and the wolf rattling around in the increasingly battered cage Niall put it in. “No, we can’t.”

“Just a look,” insists Louis. “Then we’ll go.”

Niall wants it too much to resist for long. He gets on the bus with Louis, chewing his fingernails the whole while. He shouldn’t go. He’ll only want to go in and say hi, like last time, but he can’t do it. Not when he’s – not when his future doesn’t exist.

But if it’s just a look, and no one knows that he does it. Maybe then.

Bressie lives on a residential street in Eastlake not so far from the UW campus. Niall wonders if he still plans on becoming a lecturer. Hell, maybe he is. The clapboard house is still painted the same shade of robin’s egg blue, and there’s children’s toys scattered across the front lawn: a Fisher Price table for two, a red Radio Flyer, a bunch of random Mega Blocks. Niall slows to a stop the moment the front door comes within sight, and can’t move any further. “Here’s fine,” he tells Louis, who doesn’t push. They sit down together under the shade of an oak tree across the street from the house where Theo’s growing up, and Niall wants so badly for things to be different that he breaks his own heart. The witches’ words come back to him. _This is a big life. And things break, and get lost. But it’s worth fixing._

The curtains are pulled back from the family room. Niall can see Bressie, still tall and handsome with the first flurries of gray hair peppering his temples, gesturing animatedly. He throws back his head when he laughs and kneels next to the coffee table, where there’s a wooden block tower going up. As Niall watches, Bressie scoops Theo off the floor – God, he’s so big now, he’s such a big kid – and lifts him up to place the next few blocks on top of the tower.

Theo says something, and then his little foot flails out and kicks the tower over. Niall can imagine the cacophony they make skittering all over the coffee table and floor, and he wonders if Theo still laughs the same way as he did when he was a baby.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” Niall says.

“It’s not bad,” Louis says softly. The sun descends around them, casting Louis’s face half in shadow, half in light. “To want these things. I think it’s what keeps us human.”

Niall and Louis watch the happy little family till they leave the family room. They take the bus back to their own house, where Liam must soon be waking up to his first night as a vampire, and werewolves will be arriving soon to fight a battle they must know they can’t win. And Niall carries the memory of Theo newly kindled in his heart. They don’t need to win, Niall knows. Niall just needs to give him time.

The rest of the household is gathered in Liam’s room when they get back. Harry and Nick shift aside to find Liam sitting up in bed, his eyes wide and fearful, though he’s making a courageous attempt to be calm.

“I’m sorry,” Niall says. He remembers the Liam who sold him and Zayn candy out of a gas station and kept back leftover food for them to have, and who followed them deeper into this mess because he chose to, and who told Niall that he had forgiven him. They all used to be different before this, Niall knows. He’d have walked into the house where Bressie was playing with his nephew and gone in for a hug, and not worried about shifting at the wrong moment and hurting someone. Harry would still be with his family, and Louis his.

Liam looks surprised. Zayn, who’s sitting so close to his side that he might as well be sitting on his lap, tightens his grip around Liam’s hand. “You don’t hate me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m,” Liam takes a painful-sounding breath. “I’m a vampire.”

“No,” Niall says, his voice breaking on a laugh. He thinks if he starts crying now, he might never stop. “Never.”

It’s Louis who asks carefully, “Do you…are you going, then?”

Liam meets each of their eyes. “I can be this,” he says, his eyes settling on Niall, “and be good.”

Niall tucks his face into the crook of his elbow. Some big help he is, crying like a baby while a much better man reaches out to comfort him. Harry’s palm slides across Niall’s back and Niall drags him in roughly by his t-shirt. They fit themselves into an awkward five-sided group hug.

Louis clears his throat. Niall wipes his face on Harry’s sleeve and looks at him, gathered as they are in a loose football huddle. “So,” Liam says.

“I think we should be in the same pack,” Niall says. Zayn and Harry shoot him surprised looks. Liam’s closed his eyes again; Niall remembers what that overstimulation felt like. “We’re stronger together.”

Zayn nods slowly. “We’re really doing this, aren’t we?”

“Shit,” says Niall. “You’re still my favorite, you know.”

Harry makes a hushed sound, and Niall laughs. He can’t remember the last time he laughed.

“Alright, then,” says Zayn. “Louis, you’re the boss, man. I accept your command.”

“I give it,” Louis says simply. The connection between Zayn’s and Niall’s mind breaks; it feels like letting go of his hand. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s still something of a loss.

“Me, too,” Liam says hastily. “I mean, if I can. I accept the command, too. Your command.”

Louis smiles as brilliantly as Niall’s ever seen him do. “I give it gladly.”

 Niall says the words last, and Louis repeats, “I give it gladly.”

Three heartbeats grow louder and more poignant in Niall’s ears than anything he’s ever heard before. He closes his eyes, listening to the connection grow, strengthening the bonds between them till all that’s left is Liam’s bloodstained woodsy smell and the softness of Harry’s palms and Louis’s sharp laughter, Zayn’s comforting silence.

It feels right.

***

They set about establishing borders and pair up to patrol the boundary lines. Surviving members of Louis’s and Zayn’s pack trickle in slowly from all over the Pacific Northwest. Louis’s friends Stan and Luke and Eleanor bring with them a veritable bastion of weaponry that has Liam practically weeping over a case of bullets. Zayn’s pack members Ant and Danny bring a couple of stolen cars that Harry hides in the garage, muttering to himself about what his mother would think.

Every day feels like stolen time. They slip away too fast. Altogether, Louis’s expanded pack brings in sixteen wolves plus Liam and Nick in fighting form. Nick’s vampire associates have all gone into hiding, he explained. “Wolves fight,” Nick said one night over Niall’s battered map of the coast spread out on the kitchen table, “vampires survive.”

Niall spends a lot of time with Harry. They partner up on patrols and ride the buses and trams around the city from six o’clock at night to two o’clock in the morning trading stories about kisses stolen under the bleachers at Harry’s middle school and the last baseball game Niall saw with his dad at Safeco Field.

The headaches happen more and more often. Niall learns how to stay on his feet, how to breathe through it till it passes. Sometimes he can’t, and he’ll end up retching helplessly while snapshots of someone else’s life slingshot across his vision.

He’s scared to go back into the shift.

He’s also keenly waiting for the next time his head feels like it’s splitting in half with pain. He knows, now, that some of his memories aren’t his own, and that they belong to someone else. The person who killed Gemma, and who broke the coven’s circle of power, and who’s been leading every assault on them since the other pack first set its sights on them. Niall thinks it’s about time he started using the weird, wolven connection between them to his advantage.

Niall didn’t ask to be this. But he’s got to make the most of it. He has so many reasons to try, now.

“Maybe we’d have met,” Harry muses one day on the tram. He and Niall are standing close enough together that Harry’s hips nudge Niall’s every time the tram turns a corner, and Niall thinks about getting home later that night and kissing him till he couldn’t breathe. “You know? Like, on a field trip, or something. Or at a baseball game. On a random street, just going about our lives. You think?”

“I don’t know,” Niall admits. “I reckon we’re pretty lucky we met this time round, to be honest.”

Harry hums. There’s a sweetness to him now he didn’t let show before. He cooks breakfast for the pack every morning and goes about nagging people to put their towels and things in the wash and not just leave them on the floor like a bunch of animals, though he leaves the actual execution of those things to Niall. He slides beneath the covers next to Niall every night and under the cover of darkness, they trade stories about the family members they lost.

Nick shows Liam how to be a vampire, and Louis helps Zayn how to love him all the same. They grow together till Niall feels them as a part of himself, till it feels like they couldn’t bear to live without one another.

It’s a dangerous thing to do, really.

***

Niall’s nearly asleep when the pain spears into his head like a wedge driven in by a sledgehammer. He sits up in bed and touches his hair just to make sure his skull’s in one piece.

“You alright?” Harry murmurs.

“They’re coming,” Niall answers. He’s not quite sure how he knows, now. The other end of the connection burns bright, like a flame burning through darkness. He can’t tell how close it is, or how big of a blaze. He just starts moving toward it. “It’s time.”

Niall remembers thinking that bearing Liam’s weight across his shoulders felt like what Atlas must’ve gone through every day of his cursed life bearing the weight of the world on his back. Right now, Niall thinks Atlas has it easy.

It’s impossibly difficult to be in two places at once: to exist as himself, going through the motions of battle prep and going over plans A-G for the twentieth time, and be in something else’s head at the same moment, watching the forest fly by in decreasing density as the city rises on the horizon. A wolf in full-out sprint can move so fast, though. And Niall can feel the connection linking the wolves together like the finest of gossamer threads, like rays of sunlight.

But that’s okay. Niall doesn’t have to do it forever. Just for now.

“They’re casting a wide net around the city,” Niall tells Zayn, who passes it along to Louis. He presses harder, leaning further into the almost tangible walls separating his mind from the other wolf’s. He feels like they weren’t so dissimilar once.

“Can you do this?” Harry asks, slipping his fingers into Niall’s grasp.

Niall curls his fingers tightly around Harry’s. “I’m not scared.”

It’s mostly true, anyway.

Splitting up isn’t a very wolven thing to do, so they stay together. A pack’s greatest advantage is each other, after all. Louis divides the eighteen of them up into groups of four, but not without one final inspiring speech. “We’re going to be outnumbered, and we’re going to be overwhelmed,” he explains simply. “Eleanor’s reported back that the other pack is approaching from the south, but it’s a safe bet we’ll be getting reports from the pack members in the field they’re fending off attacks on other borders.”

He pauses, then adds, “I don’t want to tell you this is a hopeless case, because it’s not.” Louis takes a deep breath, and continues. “We have traps set up across the city, and diversions, and half a dozen nature spirits. We don’t have to win, though. I do want us to put up such a goddamn bitch of a fight that they don’t get any joy out of claiming this territory. If we lose, we make them pay for it. Are you in?”

The way the pack cheers, it sounds like a wolf’s howl.

Louis splits the pack up into a handful of smaller groups of four. They’re practically indestructible that way, at least to the lone wolves heading into the city. Niall tries to figure out why they’ve come one by one.

He’s stationed at his post near the I-90 bridge over Lake Washington when he makes the connection. “They’re scouting parties,” he says. The words feel too true in his mouth for the wolf forcing its way into his brain not to confirm it; Niall can feel the gossamer net spreading wide and thin between the wolves as they move further and further away from it, the way the connection weakens between all of them as time and distance set in, but the proof is inside Niall’s own mind. “They’re just feeling us out. There’s – God – there’ll be so many more.”

Harry doesn’t react the way Niall expects. Instead of panicking, or letting a note of fear cut through his voice, he favors Niall with a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Sort of reckoned we weren’t getting out of this one in one piece.”

“I kept hoping,” Niall starts.

“I know you did. You know, before, it was all for Gemma. Being in Louis’s pack, and refusing to leave, though really – ha, it’s not like I was here, was I? I was running away as much as you were. And then…” he shrugs. It doesn’t look very casual. “And now, it’s for us. Yeah?”

Niall’s not going to say “I love you” right now because – because the circumstances are awful, and he wants Harry to know that he means them when he’s not afraid for his life. He wants Harry to know he means them when he’s annoyed with Harry for not putting the frying pan in the sink to soak so Niall has to scrub at it, and when he dozes off on Niall’s shoulder at the movies. Instead, he says, “For us.”

The first of the wolves break through their boundary lines. Niall jumps into the shift with everyone else, and the fight begins.

It’s harder to keep his two realities separate in the shift. He’s dimly aware of the other wolf closing in, of the path it’s tearing through Niall’s friends, sinking its teeth into Ant’s shoulder so that Ant howls like an animal at death’s door. It just makes him fight harder.

Incredibly, Louis’s plan seems to be working. Niall and Harry and Danielle and Aiden turn back one wolf, then two, each of them stepping neatly into their trap. The little packs united under Louis’s leadership work well together, and it feels like…Niall doesn’t quite know what it feels like. But they lean into each other across the wide web carried between them by wanting so hard for the same things, and Niall finds strength he didn’t know he had.

And then the foot soldiers arrive. The fighting wolves smell like smoke and old blood, a smell like uncooked meat left too long in an open field. Niall feels the collective wince as the rest of the pack try to turn their faces away. The scent is overpowering.

Louis steers them gently back till they’re facing it head on. _No use being afraid of it,_ he pushes into the drift, with that feeling uniquely his of stepping off a ledge into open space and finding hidden footholds across the breach. _Besides. We’re better than they are._

Not strictly true, but. It’s nice to hear, all the same.

Niall hears the howl a split second before anyone else. He’s inside the other wolf’s head, after all, maintaining his tiny ledge like a wolf locked onto its prey. A howl shatters the humid night like a bullet through glass. Buried somewhere deep in the howl, Niall hears something familiar. It sounds like his name.

Niall whimpers and drops his belly to the ground, but the sound echoes inside his mind, as well, a climbing, rising howl that would stop his heart if it could. He tracks the wolf in his mind’s eye: it breaks away from the rest of its battalion and darts northeast, heading toward the lake. The lake? Niall’s not sure.

He makes the decision before he’s aware of making it.

“ _Don’t,_ ” Louis orders him sharply. “ _Niall, we need you._ ”

“ _It’s a trap_ ,” Zayn contributes logically. Niall can hear the concern running thick through his voice.

He’s not surprised when Harry weighs in, “ _Be careful. We’ll be alright._ ”

Niall always thought that Harry was the gentlest of them, the most human. Somehow, it’s also Harry who understands best of all having to put one’s monsters to rest.

It’s still not the right time. “ _Be back soon,_ ” Niall sends. And even though he knows he’s doing just what it wants, he chases after the other wolf.

Space contracts beneath his feet same as it always has when Niall lets himself feel the wind rustling through his fur, the smells of the city fading away till all that’s left is wide open space and the sky overhead, so deep and wide and black that Niall still thinks he’ll be flung off the surface of the earth one day. This feels a little like that, actually.

The wolf chooses Seward Park, which makes little sense to Niall. He grew up visiting the little green peninsula with his dad as often as he could, flying kites over the water and going fishing in the lake and diving over the side of the boat at any excuse just to go for a swim. It’s familiar territory.

Niall’s not afraid. Mostly.

The wolf leads him into the thick of it. Niall was never afraid of the deep green woods, not even when his dad or Gran or Greg told him stories about what lived inside. “They say it’s got monsters,” Greg would say. “Monsters that would make your hair turn white, and you’d grow old in an instant, just looking at the thing.”

“I don’t believe you,” Niall decided then, at maybe six years old, when he knew everything. He knows better now.

The wolf waits for him in a little clearing. Sometimes clearings like that happen in nature. One tree falls, and it takes a brother out with it, and then another one goes, till there’s a little section of forest inexorably influenced by each other. He’s never quite liked it, though these days he reckons it’s because of the fey and their unearthly faery circles.

Niall watches himself approach from two perspectives. He steps through the wood, not being careful about being heard. There’s actually some relief in it. No more running, or hiding, or even being confused. This is the wolf that bit Niall, that’s killed his friends and tried to kill others. He doesn’t want it inside his head any longer. He’s this now, a wolf, and a person, but it’s not because of this creature. It’s because of his pack. His own pack.

From the other wolf’s perspective, Niall watches himself step neatly through the line of trees. A radiant beam of moonlight doesn’t illuminate his eyes and fill the other wolf with a tremor of fear. He’s not the biggest wolf anyone has ever seen, and his fur is deep brown, like tree bark.

But Niall’s not expecting the wave of nostalgia, almost, that rolls over the wolf. Nostalgia’s not quite the right word. More like déjà vu.

They’ve been here before.

Niall was seventeen that day, and not in the best shape. They had rent coming up due soon and he was already flunking most of his classes; he couldn’t take care of a baby and work and keep up his grades. He couldn’t hardly do a single one.

So he did the only thing he thought he could do. He gave the baby to someone else to take care of, and went looking for his brother.

And his brother found him.

The bitter pang of surprise – of it not really being a surprise, of having wondered, all along, though he didn’t want to think – is quickly swallowed up by a pain so intense that it hurts all over, like a fever. Niall doesn’t have the luxury of a point of focus; he’s just hurt, all the way through.

“ _You bit me,_ ” Niall thinks. The memory is stretched between them like time stood still. The rest of Niall’s pack are quieter, now. He thinks it’s because the link between himself and his brother is stronger, now; Niall doesn’t know whether to be afraid of that. The connection between him and his brother opens up as neatly as if they’re still little kids playing at being superheroes in the backyard before dinner.

The wolf lunges for him.

Niall steps hastily back, the wolf – Greg – gnashing its fangs just a few spare inches from the end of Niall’s snout. He does what comes natural. He fights back.

Every ounce of pain from the last two years rises up and out of him like heat from a fire. Every moment of regret that Niall got himself bit and wasn’t able to stay back and wait for Greg to come home, eaten up like a lick of smoke into the wide sky. Every moment Niall spent wondering if he was alright, if he was missing Niall, and farther down still, if he chose to leave of his own free will. The pain of shifting for the first time, and then again, and again, till Niall met Zayn. He thinks of Zayn now, a couple of years younger but no less open, and still so frightened of his own vulnerability.

The wolf – no, it’s Greg; it’s Greg – lunges for Niall again, and again, teasing him into an attack. Niall snaps back best he can, though he’s surprised to find that he’s not so unevenly matched as he thought. There’s a dully burning fever in the other wolf’s skin, Niall can feel it in the shift between them and in the simple, brotherly connection he always had with Greg.

“ _Ibi,_ ” Niall hears. It doesn’t sound like Perrie’s voice echoing through the forest, but he knows it must be her. No one else has the habit of showing up at random, critical moments in his life.

Niall manages to sink his fangs into his brother’s flank for a moment before the other wolf throws him off. Every time he takes a step back, the wolf advances. Niall’s in pretty decent shape, but he’s not in any shape to outrun this bigger, older wolf.

Where, and when. Niall remembers. He doesn’t spare Perrie his breath. The wolf makes another dive for him, so Niall sinks low, manages to get his fangs round Greg’s throat for a second. Greg pulls back and gnashes down. Pain blooms in Niall’s side with a dull, throbbing ache that makes him slower, and stupid.

“ _Go back,_ ” he hears. Perrie’s voice sounds realer now, more solid and corporeal. He still can’t see her, but he can feel her.

Niall doesn’t understand at first. Greg who’s not really Greg anymore, who’s a wolf who lost himself to the shift the moment he stepped into it for the first time, drives Niall into a fight he’s never want to had. He’s holding his own, but only for now. He can feel it the way he always used to know that Greg was going to beat him in Mario Kart, or the way Niall knew Harry was going to lean in for a kiss in the middle of doing something absolutely ordinary. _The unmistakable presentiment of loss_ , Niall imagines Harry saying, that curl to his lips.

The rest of Niall’s pack is spread across the city, driven further and further apart from each other, separated and weakened. They’re surviving for now, too, but it won’t last. Ben’s pack will keep sending in reinforcements until they’re totally run over. Theo will never get to know what his dad was like before something went awry.

Mario Kart. Niall and Greg used to play on the peninsula together. Niall remembers his dad unpacking the camping gear and setting them loose on the woods to play pretend till only hunger and fear of the dark drove them to the safety of his campfire. Niall remembers hunting for monsters and, more often, finding caterpillars and spiders and once even an honest to God bear print, probably. Niall remembers riding in the backseat with Greg with the windows rolled down and the wind blowing through their hair, their laughter lost on the wind. Niall remembers falling asleep with his ear to seat, listening to the miles unfurl beneath his dad’s tires, his feet in Greg’s lap, making sure he wouldn’t fly away.

“ _It’s too late to turn back now, though you’ll want to._ ” Perrie feels close enough now to reach out and touch.

And Niall understands.

He loses his footing and Greg’s on him in an instant, though of course he’s not really Greg anymore.

Niall can’t really talk in the shift, but Perrie’s not really alive. “This is the favor, isn’t it?” Niall asks. “ _Ubi_ and _ibi._ You brought me out here to – to turn back time.”

Perrie’s voice comes from just a few feet away. “You think time only flows in one direction,” says Perrie. “You’re wrong.”

“Don’t you ever get that feeling?” Perrie presses. Niall dodges sideways away from Greg’s next onslaught but he’s losing speed. Greg’s jaws close over Niall’s hind leg, and he finds himself trapped. When Greg’s fangs set into his soft belly, Niall knows he hasn’t much time. “Like instead of years having passed, you’ve just stepped from one room to another. Here, in the forest with your brother. Out of the room, then back in the forest again. Time is just another place to revisit.”

“The other witches needed you,” Niall knows now. The other wolf pauses. Niall thinks, for a split second, about attacking it. Greg, or the wolf of the person he used to be, has left his right side vulnerable. Niall’s got to have hope, though. “To turn back all those other wolves.”

It was never going to come down to Niall playing the big hero and defeating the bad guy. He was always just going to do his little part. He feels no little satisfaction, and strangely a sense of emptiness, that he’s just about done it.

The rest of the witches’ voice join Perrie’s. Niall can see them, distantly; he can’t quite seem to make his eyes focus. The other wolf steps back and goes down, its legs faltering under it. Niall must’ve done his share of damage too, then. His connection with Greg weakens, and Niall tunes back into his pack. The shift holds over him tentatively, like a tarp barely clinging to its moors in the middle of a hurricane.

“Niall, thank God,” Niall feels Louis think. “Where the fuck are you? I’m coming to you, I’ll be right there.”

Zayn, so frank he scares himself: “Niall, love, I was lost without you. Where’d you go?”

 _Things break,_ the witches say. _Things get lost. But it’s worth fixing._ Their gift to give, and theirs to take away. Niall doesn’t feel content, the way he thought he would when he finally ran out of luck. He lays on his side and feels the shift fold back over him slowly, almost lovingly, as if for the last time. He’s not sure if he’s really hearing Harry or if he’s just hallucinating it when Harry comforts him. “You’re going to be fine, Niall.”

Harry, comforting. “You’re going to be fine, Niall. When this is over, I’ll make you eggs just the way you like them, and then you can sleep all day. Or we can go see a movie.”

“Go see Theo,” Louis adds.

“You can hold him,” Harry says. “You could go home, even. Just hold on a minute. Louis’s gonna be right there.”

Those sound like such nice things. Niall’s so sad that he won’t be able to do them. Niall knows that the witches’ magic is working when he finds not a wolf, but Greg at his side, human again, dying beside him. Niall’s heart breaks for him.

Perrie lifts Niall’s head into her lap. He doesn’t have the strength to turn his neck anymore to look up at her face. She smooths her hand over the side of his face, and Niall lets himself close his eyes.

Liam’s not a wolf, and Niall’s eyes are closed, but Niall thinks he can see him smile his crinkly-eyed smile and say, “I forgive you.”

“You fixed it?” Niall finds the strength to ask Perrie.

She smooths his hair back. He always knew he wasn’t quite meant for this life, but now he’s had it confirmed, all he can think is that he’s not ready to let it go. He’s not ready to let go.

“Yes,” she says, a sweet confirmation.

“We did it?” he asks again, just to check. Just to be sure.

“Yes,” Perrie just says again, soft. Niall can’t hear much of anything, now. He can hear his heart beating in his chest, slower and slower. He can pretend that the heart he hears is Harry’s, that he’s back in the backseat of the Toyota with his face in Harry’s neck and Harry’s heart beating slowly, calmly, unafraid against his.  

He doesn’t have much left. Greg’s dying beside Niall, and Theo won’t ever know him, really. But the boys did. His boys did. Zayn, and Harry, and Louis and Liam. “They’re my family now,” Niall whispers, and knows that his life will be a room they’ll revisit for a long, long time. It feels as close to immortal as he ever thought he’d get.

Niall feels his heart slow, slow. Stop.

 

 

 


	2. the beginning

Niall wakes up. He’s surprised to find that he’s not dead. He’s significantly less surprised to find Harry at his bedside, his heavy head resting on Niall’s hand. His eyelashes flutter in his sleep, and he murmurs wordlessly in his sleep. Niall almost feels bad waking him up, but he has pins and needles.

Harry’s eyes open slowly. God, Niall forgot how green his eyes were. “You’re awake,” Harry whispers. He pulls Niall into the gentlest hug he’s ever had. “I thought we lost you there for a minute.”

“I think you did,” Niall answers. He has vague memories that slip away the more he thinks of them of being gossamer-like, of being sunshine spread across too much sky. “What happened?”

Nobody knows for sure. Louis found Niall in the forest mostly bled to death, next to his brother, who was proper gone. Proper gone, now. Niall listens to the words drop like stones skipping over the surface of a lake and finally sinking in, and knows that he’s not done mourning yet.

Liam, Harry says, thinks it must be some form of magic. Louis got to him, and somehow Niall survived, though the witches were nowhere to be found. Nobody asks too many questions. Niall has his own theory, though he doesn’t share it. He gets the feeling his pack had a lot to do with it, in lending him their strength.

He can’t shift anymore. He can feel it, like the cage where he kept the wolf has had its hinges blown off, the wolf nowhere to be found.

“I can still do it,” Harry says carefully, almost guiltily, his hands wrapped around Niall’s on the bed. He’s back in his room in Harry’s house under the careful watch of Nick, and also Louis and Zayn and Liam and Harry, and all the others Niall knows and loves. “I’m still a wolf.”

“Nah,” Niall says, soft. “Human.”

The wolf’s gone, but if Niall listens very carefully, as he does when he lays wide awake in the middle of the night watching the shadows of tree branches outside his window dance across the ceiling, he thinks he can hear it howling. In the past, or the future, if there’s a difference at all. Time doesn’t flow in only one direction. Sometimes a moment happens twice.

Zayn’s the first to leave their pack. “Not really leaving,” he says, all soft murmur. “But you know Louis’s going to round up all those other wolves, and I don’t really want to be a babysitter.”

“You’ll take Liam with you, right?” Niall asks.

Zayn rolls his eyes. He doesn’t move away from the bed Niall’s getting increasingly tired of, though. “You’re still my brother, man. No matter what happens.”

“I know,” Niall answers.

It seems to be enough. 

***

Harry takes Niall to visit Theo when Niall feels well enough. His heart’s pounding in his chest and his palms are slick with sweat, and as happy as Niall is that he’s still alive, he’d also like not to feel like he was about to puke, thanks.

Harry whines a little, low in his throat, and leans his furry body against Niall’s legs.

Niall pats the top of his head absent-mindedly, the door bell echoing inside the house. Niall can see his own reflection in the window. He doesn’t look as feral as he used to, or like the scared kid who’d wandered into the forest one day and changed his own life. Niall catches sight of a familiar figure in the glass, a man who looks an awful lot like Niall, but by the time he turns, it's gone.

“It’s fine,” Niall assures Harry. “We’re going to be fine.”

Heavy footsteps approach from inside. Niall tenses, half-tempted to turn and run, but he has to hope. Bressie opens the door with Theo balanced on his hip. Niall braves a smile. “I’m back.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments/kudos greatly appreciated. you can find me at niallspringsteen.tumblr.com if u wanna talk! thank u for reading <3


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